jrriv 7 mm LIBRARY OF THE University of California. Class Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from Microsoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/dynamicidealismeOOIIoyrich DYNAMIC IDEALISM Relationship among things is the criterion nei- ther of a life nor of a mind that exists apart from the substance of the universe. It is, however, the criterion of substance itself, and as the central truth about things it bears this witness : The universe itself lives ; the universe itself thinks. DYNAMIC IDEALISM AN ELEMENTARY COURSE IN THE METAPHYSICS OF PSYCHOLOGY FIRST ENTERED UPON IN LECTURES BEFORE STUDENTS IN PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN BY ALFRED H. LLOYD, Ph.D. AUTHOR OF "CITIZENSHIP AND SALVATION" V OF THE UNIVERSITY CHICAGO A. C McCLURG AND COMPANY 1898 LS ±J ~> Copyright By A. C. McClurg and Co. a.d. i8q8 PREFACE. THE following chapters, as has been indi- cated on the titlepage, are made up from material used in a university lecture-room, but the impulse to put the substance of the lectures into the form of a book really came from another source. A year ago I gave six lectures upon subjects from psychology, before the Twentieth Century Club of Detroit; and the certain diffi- culties as well as the apparent successes that I met with in those lectures led me into the writ- ing of this book. Accordingly, throughout the ensuing pages I have had in mind, as my possible readers, those who are not strictly technical students in psy- chology, and on their account I have tried to avoid the more serious technicalities. The sub- ject, however, is a deep one, and it deepens as it goes. So let me confess here that, while always courting both brevity and simplicity and often using extremely popular and large-written illustrations, I have not always refrained from 181327 VI PREFACE. saying, as occasion has offered, even what has seemed likely to be of interest only to psycho- logical specialists. My standpoint is also indicated on the title- page, at least in part. Not only am I heartily in sympathy with such thinkers to-day as insist that psychology without metaphysics is useless, if not absurd, but also I go to the extent of believing that real psychology is metaphysics. I have, therefore, whenever considering a psy- chological theory, been more interested in its relation to Dualism or to Monism — that is to say, in its metaphysical implications — than in any of its mere external details. For example, the physiological or the paidological statement of any fact or process, or the abstract statement from any other field of inquiry, has always seemed to me to be subordinate to the meta- physical principle. Only the metaphysical prin- ciple can make any fact or any process really concrete. And, finally, in special illustration of my pre- dilection for metaphysics, I may say that I have felt that the first duty of psychology was to give a distinct, explicit doctrine of the soul. Psy- chology must not and cannot tarry any longer at either the body or the mind alone, nor even at both together. " Science of the soul," the PREFACE. Vll old-fashioned definition, which has been scorned or discreetly neglected by modern rationalism, is, after all, the true definition. Perhaps, how- ever, the scorn has meant only the passing of a certain idea of the soul; and in recognition of such a possibility I have usually employed the more general term, " self," for the soul-reality. Surely there is a soul-reality, whether there be a " soul " or not. A. H. L. Ann Arbor, Michigan, November, 1897. CONTENTS. Introduction PAGB II part I. THE WORLD OF THINGS. CHAPTER I. Part and Whole 35 II. Change 48 III. Organism 54 IV. The Body 59 V. The Outer World 75 VI. The Two-faced Object, or Language . . 87 part 11. THE WORLD OF IDEAS. VII. Ideas as Forms 97 VIII. Historical Illustration 107 IX. Ideas not Forms but Forces 11 1 X. Illustrations from Education 123 XI. Body, Mind, Soul 129 XII. Time 147 XIII. A Summary: Dynamic vs. Formal Idealism 158 XIV. Consciousness as Interest 166 XV. Thought and Language 178 CONTENTS. part HI. THE WORLD OF ACTS. CHAPTER PAGE XVI. Reaction or Interaction? 197 XVII. Will 209 XVIII. The Living Ideal 219 Appendix: A Study of Immortality in Outline 227 Index 245 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. INTRODUCTION. PSYCHOLOGY, the special science through which in this book an entrance is to be made into the field of philosophy, has been defined in many ways, but the best definition, or at least the best introductory definition, runs as follows : Psychology is science of the soul. A science is a classification of facts, or of what are supposed to be facts. It is organized knowledge. The classification of facts, how- ever, or the organization of knowledge, is hardly aimless. Science does not by any means end with itself, is never only for science's sake. Men have often appeared to think that science as a body of knowledge was its own end, but obvi- ously to think so for long is quite impossible. Science leads to something. It is accordingly well worth while to recognize at the start the end or aim of science. Thus, any particular science is a body of knowledge which 12 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. defines — that is, which relates and co-ordi- nates — the incidents or conditions of some pro- cess or activity. Physics defines the conditions of a so-called physical process, such as heat or light or electricity; biology, those of what we call organic growth; ethics, those of personal conduct in society: and the process or the activity, the incidents of whose expression are defined in a science, is the end of the science itself. But although in general the end of a science is some process or activity, an important dis- tinction has to be made. Some sciences have for their end an activity which belongs, or seems for a time to belong, to a sphere quite apart from the scientist, while others would free the activity of the scientist himself. The former are called objective or, in the more general use of the term, physical ; the latter, subjective. The former seek an answer to the question, How does the world about us act? the latter to the question, How do we, and so how can we, act? Psychology, most properly regarded, is the sub- jective science. Still, objective science and subjective science are related in a way very important to remark. Thus psychology cannot but be the centre of all science. The statement was made above that INTROD UCTION. 1 3 the objective sciences were interested in the expression of activities that belonged, or for a time seemed to belong, to a sphere quite apart from the scientist ; but every one must recognize that the activities are never really apart. Sooner or later an objective science comes to be applied, and with the application the scientist makes the activity, that had seemed so apart from him, his own. The so-called application of science al- ways realizes an identity of physical process and personal activity. It shows man finding his own life in the world's life. So, to repeat, because objective sciences are concerned with processes or activities that in point of fact are not external but are destined in time to belong to the self, they are themselves as to their centre subjective or psychological. Another definition of psychology now pre- sents itself, — a definition which in the first place recognizes that the natural aim of the science is an activity, and, in the second place, makes all the physical sciences also psychological. Instead of saying simply that psychology is sci- ence of the soul, we have now to say, Psychol- ogy is science of self-expression. This definition makes psychology more than mere abstract knowledge, since it gives to knowledge a real motive-power ; and it precludes any separation of 14 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. the self and the world, since the expressed self is always the self identified in activity with the world, or, in a commoner phrase, adjusted to the world. But, again, psychology is the body of knowledge that so defines the conditions of the life of the self as to liberate the self's activity. As has been said, it answers the question, How does man, and therefore how can man, express himself? It is not, as many have tried to make it, a merely ontological science ; nor is it a merely epis- temological science : it is distinctly a biological science. It is not interested in the self only as being, in the self as a substantially and inde- pendently existing soul ; nor yet in the self only as knowing, in the self as mere mind: it is interested in the self as living and doing. Clearly the self as doing both is and knows. The purely ontological psychology has long been dismissed from a truly responsible philos- ophy, but the epistemological psychology, which assumes that knowledge or consciousness in general is somehow a distinct and separate state of the self, and accordingly a state to be explained wholly within itself, still holds sway over thinkers of the day. The former belonged to a time when theology was the predominating interest, a world quite aloof from this being supposed to be both the source and the goal INTRO D UCTION. 1 5 of mankind; and the latter, resulting from the reaction that set in so strongly toward the close of the eighteenth century, has belonged to a time given over to naturalism, to rationalism, to knowledge for knowledge's sake, to con- sciousness as something to be sought and cher- ished solely for its own clearness. But a new interest has already asserted itself in our time, an interest in expression or fulfilment instead of in mere being or in mere knowing; and in obedience to this interest psychology has been finally defined here, not ontologically as science of the soul, nor epistemologically as science of mind or of the self's sentient or conscious life, but biologically as science of self-expression or self-adjustment. The self as doing, as in ex- pression, be it said once more, both is and knows. Action fulfils soul and mind as not two but one. It goes almost without saying that the new interest of the present time carries with it a new idea of the soul itself. Were one to ask a number of persons what the soul or self is, the answers would be many. Some of them, too, would be very vague, as, for example, that the soul was life, or the body, or God in us } or unity, or the absolutely commonplace. But answers that were clear and at all definite, and that were 1 6 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. born of any insight into the spirit of the present time, would show a remarkable sympathy with that old-time thinker Aristotle. Aristotle, also living when man's life had reached or at least was approaching a culminating period, a mo- ment of fulfilment, regarded the soul as a func- tion of something. For him, as for us to-day, the soul was the fulfilment of the world, the perfection of the body. An " entelechy " he called it. As the pianist is the perfection of his piano, having quite within himself just the nature that the piano requires for the realization of the end to which it is a means ; as the me- chanic is the fulfilment of his peculiar tools and materials, being, so to speak, a sort of walking embodiment of his special environment, being the very activity that expresses the nature or meaning of his environment ; so, in general, the soul is the perfection or fulfilment of the world, the self is the entelechy of the body. Wholly in accord with Aristotle are such timely ac- counts of the self as that it is an animated expe- rience, a responsible agent, a defined but liberated force. The pianist or the mechanic or the philanthropist is describable in any one of these ways. The walking-stick or the walking- leaf, in its embodiment and expression of the conditions of its life, conspicuously illustrates INTRO D UCTION. I J what modern thought finds in Aristotle's idea, being nothing more nor less than the soul of its peculiar surroundings. So the soul or self to-day is not some entity, spiritual in character in the sense of being altogether immaterial, but an intimate function of the world in which it finds itself. The self is both in and of the world, responsible to the world and dependent upon it. Psychology is science of the expression of a self that does but show forth in its acts the meaning of the world, the inner truth of the natural universe. In short, the world's activity — that is the self, that is the soul. But, furthermore, there is the fact of con- sciousness. The self not only is, but also is conscious. Indeed, at least for psychology, consciousness is the self's chief characteristic, although, as must be kept in mind, not the only characteristic or not an isolated character- istic. Consciousness certainly does not inhere in mind as a separate part of the self, but is vitally incident, is essential in the activity of the self as a whole. Just as in physical science we should not separate the phenomenon of friction from that of motion, so in psychology we should not separate the selfs consciousness from the self's activity. Indeed, if one under- 1 8 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. stands friction for what it really is, consciousness might itself be styled a form of friction, since it is born with the tension of self-expression. Recent science, whether as psychology or as biology, has concluded that life and conscious- ness are coextensive, that where one is the other must be also. This conclusion has been reached with much reluctance, since the neces- sities of thought have not been verified with perfect satisfaction to all in the outer world ; but it is self-evident that in an outer world such a conclusion never could be verified. Uncon- sciousness is a natural predicate of anything external. As Romanes has put the matter, however, the criteria of life and the criteria of consciousness are identical, and they must be so. Of the two each one must presuppose the other. Thus, in simple phrases, life can be present only where there is capacity of a self- interested response to an outer stimulus, that is, only where the stimulus to an action answers to some already developed motive or " func- tional tendency; " and consciousness is but the apprehension of, or the interest in, such a stimu- lus. Without consciousness life is impossible. The common view that consciousness is something added at a certain time to the altogether separate condition of life, at the time, INTRODUCTION, 1 9 say, of the transition from plant to animal life, may satisfy those who limit consciousness to certain forms of experience, but it is very far from satisfying the reflective thinkers who seek the general principle of life to which the mere fact of consciousness as such must testify. It may serve a short-sighted classification to say that plants only live, while animals are also conscious, but it shuts wholly from view both what life really is and what consciousness really is. Nothing ever is what any particular form, or group of forms, of its expression would seem to have it. And the case in hand grows only the more difficult when the peculiar self-conscious- ness of man is put on trial. Plants live, it is said ; animals are also conscious, although only pas- sively so; but men think, being self-conscious, actively conscious, constructively and relation- ally conscious. Yet such distinctions, while not without meaning, can only rather hinder than help the understanding. If it is true that wherever there is life there is consciousness, it is also true that wherever there is consciousness there is thought. What is thought in its simplest nature but the use of consciousness for some act of adjustment? In all life, however, even in the very lowest, such a use is manifest. A passive consciousness, a consciousness that is 20 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. not seeking adjustment, is a contradiction of terms that can be matched only by an uncon- scious life. Yes, if we will but interest ourselves in principles, freeing our minds for a time from the notions of ordinary life, we can say to ourselves with conviction that even plants are conscious and that the very animals think. The true thinker must of course always pass quite beyond the understanding of ordinary life. He cannot use terms as he finds them used about him. In fact, in a very real sense his duty is to use them differently, that is, more deeply and more widely, with reference to their underlying meanings instead of to their obvious or superficial applications. " True," he may, for example, say to his fellows, " you and I are conscious, and we are alive, and we think withal, but quite apart from our life and our conscious- ness in themselves what are these things that we possess? What is thought? What is con- sciousness? What is life itself?" And then he gets an answer to his questions which dis- closes the very things into whose nature he has inquired in places where formerly he had been sure they were not. In general, merely to think is to find the identity of a thing and its negative ; and this one needs always to remem- ber when the conclusions of science seem hos- INTRO D UCTION. 2 1 tile to cherished preconceptions. Hostility is itself no evidence of truth, but also it is very far from being a mark of error. A deep-think- ing science must always shock one's settled views, but so at first must any brighter light dazzle if it does not wholly blind the eyes. New light always begins by being a greater darkness. The thinker himself finds his new thought at once true and unreal. So, again, even plants are conscious and the very animals think ; but not for such of us as live the passive thoughtless life of plants and animals, only for those among us who think too. In pages to follow the coextensiveness and inseparableness, indeed, the virtual identity of life and conscious- ness and thought, will be an important interest. Now, consciousness is of something, it has an object ; and a preliminary view of the object of consciousness is desirable. In general, the object is the conscious self's environment, being that of which the self is the fulfilment and em- bodiment. In a very real sense the object is only the self or subject over again. In the sin- gle case of man, whose objective environment is the world of the sensuous qualities, — colors, tastes, smells, sounds, and the like, — the identity of subject and object is apparent enough. Man must say of the object's qualities that they are 22 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. rather his states than its peculiar properties. In them he does but become aware of himself. Even at the moment when he ascribes them to the not-self he finds their identity with the self. The red rose a dozen feet away is red and dis- tant to his peculiar eye and according to his effort, implied if not expressed, to reach it. The quality of any sort in his outer world can interest and stimulate him only if it answer to some motive that is already his. In its sensu- ous quality, in its spatial character, even in the material nature whereby it has substantiality, it is he or his, being related to him or of his na- ture, and real only as he is real, changing as he changes, its structure or order only reflecting his organization, and its law being only the measure of his power. We study human his- tory in the languages and institutions and monu- ments of all sorts that have risen in the wake of man's progress, but languages and institutions and monuments are only the peculiar environ- ment, or object, of what we know as historic man. Psychology sees not a different object, but the same object in its more general charac- ters, in the characters which record a deeper and a longer history. The whole outer world, as we have it now about us, in all its wonderful nature and with all its lawfulness, has also risen INTRODUCTION. 2$ in the wake of the progress of man, or, let us say, in order to be quite broad and inclusive, in the wake of intelligent life as a whole; and even as languages and monuments, as if an outer counterpart or even a M negative " of his nature, are but man over again, so the outer world, in those most general characteristics to which the psychologist looks, is man too. What seems not-self is only the reverse of self. But this is not all that is to be said of the object of consciousness, even in an introductory chapter. This alone would be sure to be mis- understood. The object of consciousness carries with it larger implications than what has been already indicated. Thus it is a common experi- ence among us, when we see or feel anything without, when belief in a reality in any sense beyond or external seizes upon us, in the first place to feel a more or less definite responsi- bility to a more far-reaching life than our own, and in the second place to get a sense of com- panionship in that responsibility with other living creatures; and this common experience only bears witness to a general principle. Larger responsibility, and that a shared or a social responsibility, is an essential implication of objectivity in general ; and being this it must serve as a means to further interpretation of 24 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. that identity of self and not-self which has been referred to. The not-self will prove to be fundamentally social in its nature, com- prising only other aspects of the same reality of which the self is but one. Even as in human history the external or objective institutions of human life have always served a social as well as a merely natural life, — and the one of these, in fact, in the other, — so the object of man's consciousness, or of any consciousness, is more than mere object, being incident to and accord- ingly always indicative of a social life. Simply this : There is no not-self that does not itself comprise other selves. The not-self, or object, of the hand as self, is the life of the whole body ; but for the hand the life of the whole body is a social, not a merely natural or physical life : and, similarly, for the individual man the life of the outer world must be social. Ordinary historians and politicians hardly go so far as to recognize in matter or physical substance a social institution, — they reserve the term for church and state and school and the like ; but the philosopher, examining human experience at its greatest depths and in its most general aspects, can see material substance in no other light. The philosopher finds in matter as not- self rather a principle or a relation than a INTROD UCTION. 2 5 distinct substance ; a pure principle, be it said quite abstractly, of sociality. So, again, — and this is a very important point for psychology, — not-self means other selves ; or, rather, it means a system or organism of selves. Psychology has far too often neglected the sociality, the social life, intrinsic to the very consciousness of an object. Psychology has failed to see that sociality, not distinct substan- tiality, is the essence of objectivity. To fail in this way, however, to neglect so important an implication of consciousness, is to miss almost the richest truth about consciousness and its object. Psychology, then, is not natur- ally individualistic. On the contrary, psychol- ogy is naturally socialistic. As hinted before, men have recognized, although, on the whole, unreflectively, that responsibility to nature was social or shared. Again and again it has been proclaimed that man is a part of nature, being but one expression among indefinite other re- lated expressions of her life. Psychology, how- ever, greatly deepens this popular notion, when it makes consciousness, which is coextensive with life, an essentially social phenomenon. The human organism's environment, or for that matter any organism's environment, if not always social to the individual self as a whole, 26 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. is so, at some point in the division, to the self's parts. Thus, to put the case somewhat roughly, although one man may not always find other men in his objective world, yet he will find other hands or legs, or other eyes or hearts, or other living cells, or other biophores, or other molecules, or at the very least other atoms, upon which to base a social life. En- vironment is sometimes described as now social and now physical or natural, but the distinction is quite parallel to that between whole and part. One's natural environment is social to one's parts, its natural character answering only to one's unity or wholeness. There is, furthermore, another implication in the consciousness of an object than this of sociality. Not only is social life the deeper truth of the otherness of the not-self, but also an individuality of self is involved in it. With this, too, the popular mind is quite familiar. It is commonly recognized that an individual is, quite of necessity, conscious of his outer world in some particular peculiar way, although in a way always organically related to the conscious- ness of others. No two see any one thing alike ; and yet no one thing is exclusively what any single individual finds it, nor again is it the mere sum of many views of it, nor the abstracted INTRODUCTION. 2/ residue of the differences in many views. Any- thing is what all as individually related to it and to each other find it. Thus the actual function of the object of consciousness would seem to be exactly what we know the deeper function of language to be. Language, we are told very often, is a medium at once for the expression and for the exchange of thought; but this does not mean that language ever brings or ever should or could bring a literal agreement between those who use it. Language has as its natural function the adjustment or organization of dif- ferences. Those who use it come only to agree to differ. What are creeds and statutes but means to the distinct organization of differing individuals? Certainly they are far from effect- ing any real communalization. The object of consciousness, however, is only the most general case of these, and it has the same differentiating function. Above it was called a social institution, and social institutions exist for the preservation of differences, developing individuality and so- ciality together, not the latter at the expense of the former. Were the institution a separate, external, independent thing, were it in the most general instance a distinct self-existing substance, the case might be very different; but being nothing more nor less than a principle or a 28 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. relation, it mediates differences or organizes individuals in the way suggested. Environment, still another name for whatever is essential in language or in the object or in the institution, is no external medium of a social life, but is itself an actual social life directly related to whatever it is said to " environ." To put the same truth in still another way, if all were conscious of an object on literally the same terms, then the object itself could have reality, or objectivity, to none. It could be real to any one, for example, only if other forms of life than that which he was peculiarly were also related to it in ways individually peculiar to them. Consciousness, then, is essentially and fundamentally commercial; or, in the short sum, objectivity means not only sociality but also real individuality, it means that society is an organism. So, in general review, the self, with whose expression the science of psychology is con- cerned, is conscious simply by virtue of its being alive, and it is rational in that it is con- scious; and the object of its consciousness is not something separate and external, but a vital incident of a social life, involving in its very being a larger social responsibility for the self and at the same time an actual individuality. INTRODUCTION. 29 If this seems mere assertion here, in spite of what has been said in the pages now passed, there is still a chance of a satisfactory demon- stration in the more analytical chapters that are to follow. But before leaving this Introduction the other view of objectivity should be considered, at least briefly, since it affords a method of procedure, or a general scheme for the division of this book. Thus, among many thinkers the objective has been taken as that which exists in the strict- est sense of the word apart from the self, or exists, in other words, independently or in and of itself; and under this general view, directly opposed to what has been observed here, things and ideas and acts have all been said to be objective, but in as many different ways. In what sense things, such as trees, stars, books, men, stones, are regarded as objective can be quickly seen. They are spatially objective, being separable from the conscious self and from each other by measurable distances. The objectivity of things is, then, spatial or physical. Ideas, however, are said to be objective in a different way. They may be independent of any individual consciousness, they may exist apart, but the predicates of space have appar- ently no literal connection with them. They 30 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. are objective in so far as convincing, in so far as they are necessities of thinking. The ideas that one accepts as true in spite of oneself are objective. Mathematical axioms are usually given in illustration of such ideas, and some- times the moral law and religious beliefs. And finally, as for acts, these are objective in so far as done by a force or agency, sometimes said to be spiritual, sometimes altogether physical, that is wholly distinct from the self to whom they seem to attach. Usually we hear of the objec- tivity or reality of things, the truth of ideas, and the worth or morality of acts ; but, terms aside, just as the real thing has been thought to de- pend on isolation or independent existence and the true idea on a sort of intellectual externalism or determinism, so the moral or worthy act has been regarded as contingent upon a power be- yond the self. An act has been bad either because the devil did it or at least because some other than the true self did it; and, if good, one's act has been taken as giving evi- dence of a separate nature, divine, all-powerful, infinitely perfect, working its way, asserting its will in the life of wholly dependent man. But objectivity on this basis, whether as reality or as truth or as worth, carries with it as its neces- sary consequents an isolated selfhood, a wholly IN TROD UCTION. 3 1 alien environment, and a strictly communalistic society. Still, as if in spite of these conse- quents, it has been and is now much believed in. At least the unreflective consciousness seems to believe in it. The following questions, accordingly, as differ- ent ways of pursuing a further inquiry into the nature of the objective, will not seem un- timely: What is the world of things? What are ideas? And what are acts? Old ques- tions, it is true, — very old questions; but, after all, their antiquity only makes them new. Answers to them, moreover, will be the bur- den of this book ; Part I. being given to " The World of Things," Part II. to " The World of Ideas," and Part III. to " The World of Acts." The hope will be throughout to interpret the views of ordinary life without losing anything important to life itself. Perhaps the worth of life will be enhanced by the conception of the objective, already outlined here, which, instead of teaching isolation of subject and object, finds them vitally related, organically one. #at* i. THE WORLD OF THINGS. CHAPTER I. PART AND WHOLE. DEEP truths are born of simple thoughts. The simplest thought that one can have of the world is that it is a whole made up of parts. The world as a composition of parts is the world of things. Chemists, physicists, botanists, geologists, astronomers, biologists, money-changers, rulers, or the most ordinary laborers all find the world a composition of things, — of atoms, perhaps, or heavenly bodies, or more ordinary things. But in so simple a fact as composition, the philosopher finds much more than the mere aggregation that appears to the casual observer. True, the term thing is a very general term; and when we speak of the world of things, we seem to say nothing or almost nothing about it. Thing is only one of the names for the commonplace ; but God and I are others. As regards the term thing, one is at first disposed to agree with the logicians, who find the mean- ing or intension of a term changing inversely 36 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. as its application or extension. Thing, then, being applicable to everything, means in itself nothing. And yet, when one takes second thought, the thing appears as one of the mira- cles of the world. It is, forsooth, nothing more nor less than the miracle of individuality. The commonplace, however, is always miracu- lous. So in the world of things we have the wonderful world of individuals. The logician's rule is reversed, extension really deepening meaning. What all things are lies close to the heart of the universe. Individuality is certainly a very deep characteristic. The individuality of everything involves the impossibility of any classification of things, as classification is commonly understood. Indi- viduality requires that no two things be alike ; and if no two are alike, then grouping any two tinder some one head can be possible only through neglect of certain differences, only through an identification of unlikes. But are no two things alike? If they were, they could not be known as two. The mere enumera- tion of them very definitely differentiates them. Classification must of course be of a number, of two or more ; and sense of number, however vague, depends on sense of difference. It is almost an old saw to philosophy, that com- PART AND WHOLE. 37 parisons are always between unlikes, and con- trasts between likes ; and the truth in it is just that now under discussion. Classification or enumeration is necessarily of unlikes. What- ever unity exists among things cannot be inde- pendent of their differences. Number may have been taught in the schools again and again as if it were naturally applicable to things or units all alike, but the teaching was wrong. Thus, ten silver dollars are all different, for the simple reason that somebody has found them ten ; just as the ten " equal " parts of a line, or the ten " equal" sectors of a circle, are all different. Enumeration or classification does two things : it makes the many one, and it gives a special individual place and character to every single member of its whole. But this is not the sort of classification usually recognized and talked about. In truth, a line of ten parts would not be a line if the parts were ten, as most of us have been taught to understand number. It might be any undetermined group of ten unit-lines, or only one unit-line counted ten times ; but it could not be in itself one line. It might be a lot of parts, but it could not be a whole. Any number must be also one. In the matter of the ten dollars, the sum or whole, the one, must have a meaning to somebody 38 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. in terms of some end. An end, however, would necessarily give to each part, to each dollar, its own particular place, even its own particular role. A tenth dollar is qualitatively different from a ninth, and ten as a whole is different in kind from nine as a whole. But while it is true that things are not to be classified in the ordinary way on account of their differences, may they not, do they not, have certain common qualities through which a grouping of them is possible? Thus, red things would form one class, regardless of their other characters ; hard things, another ; men as human, but not animal, another; and so on. Yes, such a grouping of things as this is pos- sible, but unfair to the things or to the so-called common quality. It neglects something essen- tial in the things themselves. Different things do not even have common qualities. Qualities are not marks of things external to the things themselves. Most surely a red rose is not red as anything else is red. The redness of a rose is peculiar, because the rose itself is peculiar. No quality of anything can be independent of any of all its other qualities; and to assume an independence is to make the quality an alto- gether external mark, and then not a quality. So, as the term is generally used, classification PART AND WHOLE. 39 of things is impossible. Isolation, however, is as unfair or as artificial as classification. As things absolutely alike could not be known as many, so things absolutely different could not be known as different Recognized difference is in itself evidence of some unity. Things seen to be different cannot but belong to the same whole, being means to one and the same end. Classification may identify unlikes, but with equal certainty separation isolates likes. Many doctrines in science, some even of com- paratively recent date, as well as many notions in every-day life and many institutions of society, have asserted or assumed the possibility of an identifying classification or of its counterpart, an isolating separation. The mediaeval doctrine of the genus, the doctrine of the immutability of species or persistence or disappearance of types, the Deductive Logic, the doctrine of in- heritance of acquired traits, the nativistic or in- tuitional theories of morals and religion, all the monarchical institutions of society, all systems of caste, are distinctly hostile to any real indi- viduality, since they assume that individuals can be either herded under some common arbitrary head or excluded absolutely. All of them re- duce the class to a mere composition of individ- uals united by no inner nature of their own, but 40 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. by some external principle. All commit the sin of identifying unlikes or separating likes, or both. Natural enough has been the claim of monarchs to authority by divine right ; and the reference of concepts or class-ideas to another world has been natural too, since the source of unity has been thought quite external to the things unified. The simple truth is that composition involves an intrinsic unity of the component parts. In short, parts are more than mere component parts ; they are related parts, being related to each other with reference to some end to which all are means. As was said above, merely to count them, to know them as many, is to relate them. Not a mere composition of parts, then, but a system of relations, each thing being a relation, is what the deeper regard of the world of things reveals. Things are not component parts united through some external unity, but a system of rela- tions with a unity quite its own. A chair, for ex- ample, is a system of relations ; so is a man ; and so the earth as a whole on which we live or to which we in turn are related. Moreover, each one of these illustrating systems is itself a particular relation within a larger system. Any part of the universe is at once a relation itself within a larger whole and a system of relations within PART AND WHOLE. 4 1 itself as a whole. Any thing is both a part and a whole. Thus a foot is itself composed of inches in a certain relational system and is a relational part of some larger length, a yard or rod or mile. It may be unusual to some to think of the world of many things as a system of relations, but however unusual it cannot be without real significance almost from the start. Certainly no thing ever means anything, ever has any reality, except as it is related to other things. The very essence of meaning, indeed the primary test of reality, is relationship. A thing is real in proportion to the measure of the universe that is discoverable in it. Multiplicity of rela- tions is what makes for substantiality. Says some one here, and very appropriately : " There is a wide difference between saying that things are relations and that things are related. Were they only relations, there could be no real things, no terms of relation, only pure formal relationship. A world of mere relations must be impossible, since there must be things, defi- nite, real, substantial, among which the formal relationship prevails. There must be cousins as well as cousinship, legs and arms as well as the angles and other relations that enter into the determination of a chair, coins and commodities 42 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. as well as prices." But relationship is other than the mere formal external condition that the objector here has in mind. Relationship is not formal, but dynamic. It is, quite in and of itself, substantial. It cannot be both real and formal. To make the distinction between formal and actual or dynamic relationship quite clear is not at all easy. In the first place, however, it may at once be admitted that the existence of sepa- rate substantial things would be a necessary supposition if an only formal relationship pre- vailed. There would, then, be two distinct spheres or worlds, one of things and another of relationships. Imagine, for example, a dualism of cousins and cousinship ! But relationship as actual does away with any dualism. Yet what does actuality mean here? How can relation- ship really be substantial? Consider a very practical question. Do we make a chair out of things or things out of a chair? Suppose some one answers that we make it out of things, out of legs and arms and rounds and seat and back and glue and so on. Then arises a very serious difficulty, since the things are not legs nor arms nor rounds nor glue until made so by the chair. The whole, accordingly, makes its parts ; and the answer PART AND WHOLE. 43 given above is turned against itself. Parts and whole are not two separate realities; they are one and the same reality. The parts are rela- tions ; the whole is a system of relations ; and each involves the other in itself. Relationship makes both the chair and its members. So con- ceived, however, relationship is essential in things ; it is the things themselves, not a formal condition of them ; it is substantial. The chair, then, makes its parts quite as truly as the parts make the chair; and the chair, be it added, is really no chair until through active use it is related to things beyond itself. Use or activ- ity relates, and so in use or activity lies that which makes relationship actual. Things, how- ever, always are in some use. Again, imagine a river, a boat, a pair of oars, and an oarsman, and consider how until the activity to which they are means is expressed only the most formal relationship prevails among them and they have themselves only a quasi reality. The activity, however, which fulfils the end to which they are all means, makes their relationship real. Relationship, indeed, — and this is the important fact, — means activity. The two, relationship and activity, are one. So not things exist and are related, as two distinct facts, but the existence or actuality of 44 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. things is relationship; and the things them- selves imply the very activity that realizes their relational character. In short, the world of things as relations is intrinsically a mechanism in action; and, more than this, it is a mech- anism in action from a power or force that is involved in its very nature. The world of things is a self-active mechanism. This, how- ever, is anticipating a little. A world of things as relations, a system of relations, is intelligible, intrinsically intelligible. Of course a mere composition cannot be in- trinsically intelligible, being intelligible only through a unity external to itself. Things intel- ligible in this latter way may differ from each other, but only by a difference so absolute as to be without meaning, that is to say, by a difference of complete exclusion. Intelligible in the former way, intrinsically intelligible, they have differences that are positive conditions of their unity. Oars and hands and boat and water, or a chair's legs and arms and rounds, or a man's heart and stomach and lungs are different, widely different, but always in a way consistent with a unity quite within themselves. In the case of extrinsic intelligibility, while the mind might be said to have apprehensions, it could not be said to apprehend things in PART AND WHOLE. 45 themselves; it could apprehend only some- thing external to things in themselves ; but in intrinsic intelligibility, which belongs to things that are not formally but dynamically or actu- ally related, mind is in and of the things appre- hended, being indeed the relationship itself or, since this is dynamic, the relating activity. In short, in intrinsic intelligibility things in them- selves can be apprehended; and, as a second consequence, the intelligible is also intelligent. The dependence of intelligibility upon rela- tionship was indicated earlier in this chapter. It is one of the self-evident facts of life. As said before, we understand a thing only as we can find other things involved in it. We believe in a thing's permanence and reality only as we see its dependence on other things. But now a still deeper implication of relationship is present to us ; namely, the intelligence of the intelligible. Not only are things intrinsically related, and so intelligible, but also in them and of them exists a relating activity, which is intelligence or mind. The self-active mechanism is inherently intelligent. Intelligence is but the natural self-activity of a system of actual relations. Of great interest is it to know how the early thinkers, the ancient Greeks for example, reached the conclusion that mind or intelligence belonged 46 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. intrinsically to the world. They too, although almost blindly at first, declared that in a world of relations mind was real. Thus, Anaxagoras taught that the world was composed of homoeo- meries, each one of which, a sort of atom, con- tained at least in some measure everything to be had in the universe. It was as if he had con- ceived the world as an infinitely perfect mixture of all its elements, so perfect a mixture that each infinitesimal part contained some portion of every ingredient represented in the whole. A perfect mixture in truth ! It is no wonder that expounders have frequently described Anaxa- goras' primitive world as a hash ; for a hash it certainly was, in which each part contained the whole. And a world so mixed, so composed, the great thinker asserted, was moved by mind, which had power over all things; it was con- trolled by intelligence. But his hash or infi- nite mixture is plainly only the world of relations, as he crudely saw it. Only a thing, or a part, as a relation, can be said to contain the whole. In a word, Anaxagoras with his world of homoeo- meries had all but reached the conclusion of the identity of relational character and intelligence. " Infinite mixture " is only a physical way of de- scribing relational character; and the homoeo- mery only a physical abstraction for the thing, PART AND WHOLE. 47 that is to say, the individual part, as a relation. What crude thinker does not have his disguises ? Anaxagoras might have said of a line, that it was made up of hotnoeomeries, that is, of points or positions, each one of which "contained," which is to say implied y the whole; but his meaning could be nothing more nor less than that a line is not a mere composition, but a rela- tional whole. So, in summary, the deeper truth in the sim- ple fact of the world's composition is the fact of relationship, which makes the unity of the world consistent with the differentiation of its parts; and because the relationship is dynamic instead of formal, being even identical with the world's activity instead of a passive condition, the world of things is intelligible, and, by virtue of its in- herent intelligibility, also intelligent. Even once more to repeat, things are not mere relations ; they are not merely related ; they are themselves in so far as real a relating activity, which is mind. Mind is the movement in things; it " has power over all things." * 1 In a paper before the American Psychological Associa- tion on •' Epistemology and Physical Science — a Fatal Paral- lelism," I have indicated how Chemistry and Physics, and even Mathematics, as well as Epistemology, need to recognize that parts are not things only formally related, but themselves actual relations. See Proceedings for 1897. C UN1VERS1T CHAPTER II. CHANGE. " I ^HE world of things as a self-active mech- * anism must be a changing world. The nature of change, however, is a difficult problem, and in philosophy it has had many and widely divergent solutions ; but in general it is evident to any one that the solution for those who think of their world as a system of actual relations will be very different from what it is for such as see only a composition of separate or merely out- wardly united things. The question of change is the question of motion ; or, rather, it is, in the first place, only more general than the special question of travel. What is it to travel? Does the traveller move away from one place to another, each place and he himself remaining unchanged, the change consisting in a transition quite apart from its conditions, or is travelling in some way expres- sive of the existing relations of different places to each other? Plainly the former would have to be the case, if the world were a composition CHANGE. 49 of places, each place being wholly alien to the next ; but the latter, if the world be a system of relations. In the former case the traveller leaves wholly behind the place from which he goes — and many people do seem to travel on this plan ; but in the latter his motion is rest also, — that is, he both goes to a new place and remains in the old, or, as the same thing, takes the old with him, In other words, at least for the Relationism, to which this book is already committed, travel is commerce, not separa- tion ; it is a staying at home as well as a wandering. And now, secondly, in the world of relations what can be said of motion? Certainly not that any isolated thing moves, nor yet that the whole moves, but that in motion the inner nature of the whole is expressed, motion being rather a fulfilling than a radically changing process. All are familiar with the idea of the relativity of motion. The relativity of motion, however, means simply that motion, like travel, is always expressive of the existing relations of the parts of some whole. When the Greeks, to whose early thinking reference has been made here already, reached the notion of space as made up of points, which are of course dimensionless parts, having no 4 50 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. size, no distance, only position or relationship, very properly, although without fully under- standing themselves, they inferred that in such a space motion must be an illusion. " The flying arrow rests," one of their subtle thinkers was bold enough to proclaim; and again: " Achilles, swift of foot, can never overtake the tortoise." They very properly reached this conclusion about motion, because in a space of related positions motion could be only the ex- pression or fulfilment of the spatial relationships, being that wherein these relationships were made real or substantial. Any moving thing, for example, could never be said to have aban- doned its starting-point, or for that matter any part of its path, but even in being at its starting- point or at any other place in its progress it would be also already at its destination. Of Achilles one might say paradoxically that he never could or never would overtake the tortoise, because from the very beginning he had already overtaken him. So, again, motion is the mani- festation, not of a composition or aggregation of isolated positions, but the interaction or the organization of always related positions. Of so large a whole as the solar system, if we speak strictly and reflectively, we can say neither that the whole system is moving somewhere, we CHANGE. 5 1 know not where, nor that any part, say any planet, moves in its own peculiar path, but that in all the manifold movements we have fulfilled, that is, made real and substantial, the system itself. In fine, whatever one's ordinary con- sciousness may be disposed to, it is obvious enough to second thought that movement in a path is also rest. The movement of the part, the relational part, is the rest of the whole, the rest of the system. And change, like motion and travel, is also always expressive of existing relationship. Were the world composite in the sense of being with- out an intrinsic unity in its parts, change could be possible only as a series of absolute deaths, only as a constant complete destruction and a constant wholly novel creation. In a composite world does not the very difference on which change of course depends have to be a differ- ence that wholly alienates? But, the world be- ing relational, change is the expression of the relations of things, — as said now so often. Not the whole as whole changes, nor does any part in and of itself change ; but change is the inter- action of the parts in their expression of the unchanging whole. As motion is rest, as travel is also staying at home, so change is the ever fulfilling expression of what always is. 52 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. And change of this sort is not merely possible in a world of actual relations ; it is inevitable, being essential to the relational character itself A relational whole must be active within itself; it must be self-active. Indeed its self-activity has been anticipated here, when actual relation- ship was found to be inseparable from activity. Just as a line becomes a motion, or at least the real path of a motion, as soon as its character as a system of actually related positions instead of a composition of only formally related parts is fully realized, so also the world becomes a sphere of activity, nay, activity itself, so soon as the relational character is clearly appre- hended. A relational whole is, ipso facto, self- active ; it is, then, animate ; it is, to repeat from above, intelligent as well as intelligible; in a word, it is an animate intelligence. In the world of related things, or rather of things as relations, there is present necessarily the very spontaneity to self-expression, which as mani- fest in certain special forms is called life. The world of change is a living world. Perhaps this conclusion from premises so simple and so simply stated will seem sudden and as absurd as sudden. Somebody is sure to insist that it takes volumes, not pages, to prove life essential in the universe, and that CHANGE. 53 even after volumes the proof is not always convincing. Well, that, may indeed be; but length itself is certainly no better foundation of a proof than simplicity, and some may fairly choose the latter. The conclusion, then, even after only a short chapter or two, is that life and intelligence are one. The universe lives, and all life is intelligent. All life thinks. The universe thinks. CHAPTER III. ORGANISM. THE name for such an animate system of relations as the world of things proves to be, a name that every thinker to-day is using constantly and that is indeed a sort of cry or watchword for every great cause in modern life, is organism. The world of things is an organism, — a spontaneously changing, living, intelligent organism. But this is to deny existence to the inorganic, since the world of things is all-inclusive. Many there are, however, who cannot admit such a denial to their thinking. What can be said to them? Well, it certainly does deny positive existence to the inorganic to find organic life in the world as a whole, but it does not deny meaning. Inorganic is a negative term, and negation in general is too easily misunder- stood. As hinted in an earlier paragraph, it is frequently taken to be evidence of another order of being than that denied, although the thinker has always to end with the discovery ORGANISM. 55 of an identity between a thing and its negative. Only thinking brought Greek and Barbarian together into one life, and Jew and Gentile; and in modern times thinking has brought man and not-man, or animal, together. Thus man and animal are not now properly regarded as two separate orders of being. Negation, then, instead of being a process of final separation, is really a way of relating and uniting. What men really mean by the inorganic — this being the case in hand — is so much of what the world contains as fails to come up to an idea of the organic that is determined by certain discovered and at least partly understood forms. Simply the inorganic is not organic as certain recognized specific forms are organic. Still, even in thinking of it at all, men at once relate it to the organic that is known to them, and so definitely assert a fact or a principle of organism that is deeper and broader than any of the already recognized organic forms. Of that which they have found to be the lowest form of organic life they are forced again and again to say, as a consequence of their own thinking and of their own experience too: " After all, this is only an organism; it is not the organism ; it is not the vital unit. For the organism we must encroach still further upon $6 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. what has seemed till now the inorganic." The bounding line, accordingly, set by the negation is at best a moving line ; and in view of this shifting character negation itself is seen to be rather a principle of organization than an in- dication of any determined dualism between such and such established forms as the organic and such and such other established forms as the inorganic. Whatever dualism exists, in other words, is rather an incident of organic life itself than a witness to an absolutely in- organic realm of being. Natural scientists, inspired by the idea of evolution, have frequently said in so many words that life has sprung from the lifeless, but they have always subsequently discovered that what had seemed lifeless was really living. Experi- ments purporting to create life out of the life- less, although appearing successful at first, have always been exposed and discredited in the end. And when we are told, for example, that the warm rays of the sun striking down upon stag- nant pools are productive of life, we are thoughtless indeed if we suppose this to be evidence of abiogenesis. The fact, so far as it is a fact, indicates not how life is created, as if it had not existed before, but, more precisely than we had known before, what an already ORGANISM. 57 existing and an always existing life really is. No more fatal charge can be brought against such as believe in an absolutely inorganic world, in the inorganic as a substance or form of reality quite by itself, than this necessity to which they are brought of believing in a sudden coming into being, or in what to all intents and purposes is a miraculous creation. Of course life is an effect; it must have a cause. But causation is not creation. A cause is only an essence, or a principle, or an under- lying function or process, which in its effect has an express fulfilment. Some would have it, as indicated above, that the sun shining on the stagnant waters creates life. The condition of 4 being stagnant, however, already is life, so that there is no creation ; and, in the special terms of these pages, causation finds its proper ex- pression in the simple fact that relational char- acter, as if a warming sun, animates even the " inorganic," but only because it is itself the al- ready existing condition of the " inorganic :'* Life appears in nothing to which it has not always belonged. So, again, it does deny distinct existence to the inorganic to find the world of things an all- inclusive, a spontaneously changing, living, in- telligent organism, but it clearly does not deny 58 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. meaning. The meaning of the inorganic is simply that life is larger and deeper than has yet been realized, that the living forms which have been recognized are, after all, only organs in an including organic life. Put paradoxically, the meaning of the inorganic is nothing more nor less than that reality is essentially organic. Negation, or separation, is vitally incident to organism ; or, from above, it is rather a principle or function of organization than a witness to anything like a fundamental dualism. And of course parallel to the separation of the organic and the inorganic is that in technical psychology of self and not-self, of subject and object; and all that is true of the separating negation in the former case is true also of the separating negation in the latter case. CHAPTER IV. THE BODY. JUST such an animate system of actual rela- tions or just such an organism as the whole world of things proves to be is exem- plified in any individual body. Perhaps the human body affords the fullest exemplification of the world's nature, of its relational charac- ter and animation; but in any body whatso- ever that nature can be found. Doubtless this seems to approach very near to anthropomor- phism, but anthropomorphism is not a re- proach, if one does but see the man, to whom the world is likened, in his essential and world- wide, world-deep characteristics. To enumerate evidences that the body is an animate system of relations, self-active and intelligent, is possibly unnecessary, but an enu- meration may not be without some interest. Thus : (#) the body is an instrument of adjust- ment ; (£) within certain limits the functions of its different parts are interchangeable, or, other- wise put, it is an instrument of adjustment to 60 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. itself as well as to what is without; (c) none of its organs act in isolation, but all as one always; (d) its consciousness is subject to a law of relativity ; and (/) its sensation, or con- sciousness, is not confined to any specific organs, called organs of sense, but is a func- tion of the interaction of the parts of the organism as a whole, belonging to organic life as such, not to any specific forms. Of each of these five facts, which are only a few of the many that might be cited in evidence of the body's intelligence, a few words may be said. {a) That the body is an instrument of adjust- ment, every one recognizes. The body is in- deed often called a tool, a mechanism, and is said to have been given to man as a means to his expression of himself in the world. Its different parts, too, notably the hands, are fre- quently and not improperly called tools. Still, suggestive as this the mechanicalistic view of the body and its parts is, it is all too likely to lead to serious misunderstanding, and it cer- tainly does not adequately represent what is here intended by the body as an instrument of adjustment. To say the least, one must get well behind the mechanicalistic theory before fully understanding what adjustment is. True, in every act expressing adjustment a tool or THE BODY. 6 1 mechanism of some sort is used ; but there is never any real adjustment effected unless the used mechanism is capable of adapting itself through appropriate inner modifications to the results of the activity. The strictly mechan- icalistic view ordinarily assigns to the body no such capacity, and yet such a capacity there must be. The body is a mechanism, but a mechanism that constantly adjusts itself to the results of its own activity; and such a mechan- ism is a living organism, defined heretofore as a substantial system of relations or an animate intelligence. Adjustment, too, being quite de- pendent on the capacity of inner modifications in the mechanism employed, would be alto- gether impossible in any universe save such an one as was itself an organism. In such a universe, since each one of its parts, or organs, by dint of the relational character would " con- tain the whole " and would accordingly be in an original adjustment to the whole, any action would always express the whole, and from the standpoint of the individual to whom it was referred would be as much an adjustment to self as to anything without, as much inner mod- ification as outer accommodation. But mechan- icalism is committed necessarily to a dualism of agent and mechanism, for it has to make 5 62 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. activity nothing but outer accommodation, the active self assuming something alien to its nature. According to mechanicalism, in other words, the self arbitrarily puts on, or depend- ency, helplessly submits to, a certain way of life, instead of expressing its natural self in a life naturally its own. According to the line of thought, however, that is followed here, such a dualism is out of the question, adjustment upon its terms being quite without meaning. The body is, then, an instrument of adjustment only for acts of real self-expression; and for the source of agency we do not have to look beyond the body itself, self-activity as well as capacity for complete adjustment being involved in its very organic or relational character. (J?) As was said in so many words, the inter- changeableness of functions is only further indication of the real nature of adjustment. Thus it is a phase of the necessary inner modi- fications. The term " interchangeableness," however, has to be qualified, since it can by no means be taken literally, being justified only in the lack of a better. What it really refers to is the well-known capacity of recovery from loss or injury through the use of another than the affected part. At times a lost or injured part is wholly restored; at times the recovery THE BODY. 63 is limited to substitution ; but in general it is to be observed that injury, or even loss, is only an extreme form of the constant need of adjust- ment or self-expression that man and organic life must ever meet with, and also that the recovery, like adjustment at any time or under any conditions, is possible only because the whole, or suppose we say the idea of the whole, is always active in every part of the injured creature. In man recovery by restoration is unknown except in cases of the minor parts or organs, such as the nails ; a lost arm is lost for life. Man, accordingly, has usually to depend on substitution, as when losing the eyes he has to see with ears and fingers, or when losing his right hand he has henceforth to hold his pen and other tools of his activity in his left, the substitution being possible only because to have acquired an activity is at the same time to have trained other parts, not exactly to the same activity, but at least to a moving sense of the relations involved in the same activity. Thus the left hand is trained to write, although in a mirror-script, even while the other acquires the direct activity of writing ; and between any two organs in the body essentially the same sym- pathy must prevail. But in lower forms of life than man recovery is more likely to be by 64 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. restoration. The lower the forms are, the nearer are they to being mere groups of similar organs instead of highly differentiated organisms ; and restoration, accordingly, among them is not essentially different from simple reproduction. Again, however, among the higher forms such as man even the lost as well as the injured parts are restored in the offspring. The method of recovery, then, would seem to depend on the point of view naturally taken in any specific case ; and, not to prolong this discussion, it goes almost without saying that any one who would comprehend what the activity in organic life is should be able to reduce to a single funda- mental process the three chief forms of adjust- ment here referred to, — restoration, substitution, and reproduction. Moreover, in the process of reproduction, if this term may be used for the typical process, exactly such a change must be fulfilled as has been found natural within an animate system of relations. 1 Reproduction can be only such a change as is incident to the expression, or self-being, of an organism. To one's deeper thinking change, reproduction, and adjusting activity are but different names of one and the same thing. (c) That none of man's organs act in isola- 1 See chap. ii. THE BODY. 65 tion is one of the things commonly recognized but seldom very seriously applied. The Whole, however, so the familiar principle runs, always is active in every part. So true is this that scientifically one is forced to say that walking is not only with the legs but also with the hands, or that seeing is not only with the eyes but also with the fingers. Simply, to repeat, any specific activity is of the whole in the part, not of the part alone. Not to refer to other cases of sepa- ration, it has been the habit of many to insist upon separating at least the organs of con- sciousness and the organs of conduct or posi- tive overt activity, as if the system of organs for conduct and the system of organs for con- sciousness were substantially distinct ; but even such a separation is obviously not in accord with the true character of organic life. Con- sciousness, as has been seen already, and as will be seen still more fully hereafter, is a function essential in organic life as such, not a power of certain isolated organs. That we see also with our legs and arms is plain to any one looking at the ascending stairs or the lofty mountain or distant tree, or at the distant object of any kind. Distance appeals sensuously to the organs of movement as well as to those of mere vision. Recall, too, that the violinist often becomes 5 66 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. hoarse while he plays. A recent author 1 of an interesting work on the painters of Florence has recognized that the eyes live not to them- selves alone, when he makes the tactile values of a picture important to its success. He finds a picture more than mere color and form ; he finds it also something to touch, something which we seem to touch even while our eyes behold it; in other words, which we see not only with our eyes but also with our fingers. He might, however, have gone even farther, and found values for all the senses in the experience of any one, and sensation itself in consequence a function of the whole organism. (d) But the psychologist finds the animate intelligence of the body most clearly shown in the Law of Relativity, so-called, to which all consciousness is subject, and according to which the meaning of any experience is dependent on its relation to all other experience past and present. Is the stone on which you happen to place your hand hot or cold? Whichever it be, the experience of your whole life in each and every detail, trivial or important, is in its quality. Are you given over to certain tenets, religious or political? In them, too, your own individual life finds expression. With this rela- 1 Mr. Bernhard Berenson. THE BODY. 6 J tivity of all experience the science of psychology has long been concerned. Introspection and experimentation have been employed to define and interpret it. But the most striking results have been reached, naturally enough, in the simple experiences of the different senses. Some have even found a law of mathematical precision. The work and conclusions of We- ber and Fechner are well known. Weber thought himself justified in asserting as the Law of Relativity that the different sensations of any particular sense depended upon a cer- tain constant ratio of increase in the physical stimulation, and Fechner went so far as to say that the sensation changed proportionately to the logarithm of the stimulus. Weber and others have found special fixed ratios for dif- ferent senses, — " difference thresholds," as they are styled ; for example, one-thirteenth for pas- sive and one-nineteenth for active touch, ac- cording to one set of experiments; one-third for visual sensation; three-tenths for hearing; and so on. But such accurate results have to be taken with several grains of salt, and can be said only to show conclusively the general principle of dependence or relationship. It is enough to condemn them that they really pre- suppose not only an isolated consciousness, but 68 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. also an isolation of the several sense-organs. Implicitly, however, back of their form of state- ment, they conclusively demonstrate that a sensation is not a psychic atom or entity, un- changing and exclusively individual, but an actual relation. Mathematical formulae, applied to physical changes, could not be more fatal to the atomist's standpoint. In general, ideas are not many, but one always. The self has at any time, and has had through its whole life, but one idea or one sensation, the succession and varia- tion in its experiences being due only to natural relational differences. In so simple a succes- sion and variation as offered by the sentence, " Every man should know his own mind," the words are all different, but the idea is one, each different word being only a specific indi- vidual expression of the organic whole; and so with any consciousness in the life of the self. Why, life as a whole is only the expression of a long, highly complex sentence, the end of which is in the beginning. 0) That the body is an animate intelligence, or that the nature of consciousness is just that assigned to it already, is indicated further in the virtual refusal of modern psychology to assign any limit to the number of the special organs of sense. In the first place, if a limit were assigned, THE BODY. 69 consciousness would have to be looked upon as in some way or in some measure external to the essential nature of the organism, or the organism to be endowed with that self-con- demning dualism of organs of consciousness and organs of mere action or physical process. But psychology to-day finds the number of sense-organs indefinite. Different names are used, and about many of the organs there is much controversy, but agreement in setting no limit to the number is very general. Thus, in addition to the five senses of tradition, — those of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, — we hear to-day of a motion-sense, a temperature-sense, a special sense for cold, the " cold-spots," and for heat, the " heat-spots," and special senses even for pain and pleasure; and the eye has been said to be at least three distinct organs, being made up of one each for the three colors, blue, green, and red, and the ear two, one for music and another for noise. So, secondly, whatever may be said of the particular terms in which this multiplication of the organs of sense is expressed, it must eventually have the effect of turning consciousness into something that belongs vitally, not formally, to the organism. It must make consciousness more than a mere being aware of something outside or external ; yo DYNAMIC IDEALISM. it must make consciousness inherent in the self's expression of an existing relation to something. And certain very direct conclusions from an indefinite multiplication of the conscious organs will show its meaning still more clearly. Thus, (i) it makes any localization of the self in a particular part of the body altogether unnatural or unnecessary. The self is neither in this selected part nor in that ; the self is the organic activity of the whole ; nowhere, because every- where ; not itself localized at all, because always expressing the relations of localized parts. Surely no one would say to-day that the func- tion of digestion is localized in the stomach, but the self is only the central function of all the recognized specific functions. Then (2) consciousness, being due only to the interaction of organic parts, being vital or essential in organic life itself, cannot possibly be of anything altogether external to the con- scious subject. So long, it is true, as one holds to the notion of a limited number of organs of consciousness, one must also hold that there is something outside to which the self has no re- lations or which is in its nature quite different from that of the self. The very limitation will create the dualism. The outer world may be THE BODY. J I visible and audible and tastable and tangible and smellable, but here its positive relations to the conscious self would have to end. In cer- tain properties, of course distinctly physical properties, it would be quite separate and un- like, — in such properties, for example, as its space, its motion, and its force. But when one assigns no limit; when one makes sensation a general principle, not a character peculiar to a few organs; when one finds that the world is more than merely tangible and audible and tastable and smellable and visible, being wholly and thoroughly able to the organism, — then the dualism completely disappears, having a foot- hold for itself neither in the nature of the self nor in the outer world to which the self is so completely related. The motion-sense alone is enough to refute the dualism of mind and mat- ter, the psychical and the physical, since motion has long been set down as the essentially physical property, the so-called primary quality of matter. In short, then, the not-self, or object, the outer world, is essentially and thoroughly able to the subject ; and plainly this is only an- other way of saying, what has been suggested before, that subject and object, although dis- tinguishable, are both naturally incident to an organic life, of which the subject alone is but a 72 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. relational part, the object being the subject's otherness, or its negative, or the sphere wherein its adjustment to the other relational parts is realized. Any organic whole must, by virtue of its active nature, offer to each of its parts, or organs, an object or sphere of ableness. For a simple illustration, consider again the relation of such an organ as the hand to the whole body. Very much as the hand might be said to have its object, or not-self, in the other parts of the body, so any individual has a consciousness of the otherness or negativity that the very indi- viduality makes within the including organism. But (3) the object of consciousness here under discussion is, in general, the medium of the subject's expression of itself; and the fore- going leads to the conclusion that this medium is no abstract medium, external in its nature to the subject supposed to use it. On the contrary, the object as medium must be altogether nat- ural, or, let us say, in remembrance of a para- graph or two in the Introduction, altogether social to the subject, alive with the life of the subject, and always adapted to its activity. Not an abstract medium, then, as if a dead language, to which the self could conform only mechani- cally, or only by taking upon itself an unnatural activity, but a living mediator, whose activity is THE BODY. 73 already the self's own. Even matter, so this amounts to saying, is a mediator, not a medium. Physical science has thought otherwise ; and, to touch upon what some would refuse even to mention in a work of any rational pretensions, a science that has called itself " Christian " has undertaken to elevate man to an irresponsibility to matter and its natural laws, — an undertaking, by the way, which does but show how ready the Christian is to draw conclusions from Physics. But matter, as here appears, is actu- ally able, or possible, to the self, being nothing more nor less than that in which the self lives, and moves, and has its being. " Christian Sci- ence " might have been so much more useful in the world, if only it had not been so seriously misled by Physics. No alien life is the life of nature, of physical nature, but man's life in its deeper responsibilities; his strength and hope and immortality. Man's very consciousness of it is evidence of his lasting communion with it, and of its mediating worth to him. " Gross materialism " charges somebody, in the absence of any real reflection on what has now been said ; but enough that it is not ma- terialism, or that the implied idealism of the assailant is undoubtedly of a piece with gross materialism itself. Merely to utter the charge 74 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. is at once to be guilty, although indirectly and unwittingly, of the same abstraction and par- tiality of view. Then, too, in face of the fact that matter must stand for some reality in the sphere of human experience, it would be hard indeed, if not impossible, for any philoso- phy to avoid being in some way materialistic. In these modern times names have ceased to be conclusive arguments. But, to resume, in the ways that have been mentioned here and discussed at some length, the body is intelligent intrinsically, as itself an animate system of relations, being one in charac- ter with the world of things. And, to emphasize perhaps the most important point in the whole chapter, the body's natural intelligence involves a living mediation, which is to say, a social medi- ation between itself as subject and the world about it as object. This living mediation, how- ever, or organic relationship, between subject and object, is strikingly manifest in the nature of space, which is commonly regarded a pecul- iar character of the outer world. To the outer world, accordingly, to the world in space, the thought of these pages must now turn. CHAPTER V. THE OUTER WORLD. IN philosophical discourse the phrase "the outer world " has been almost as ambigu- ous as the term " objectivity." The two terms, indeed, " outer " and " objective," have often been used synonymously, so that both of them have to be taken as referring now to things in space, now to true ideas, and now to adjudged or evaluated acts. Here, however, by the outer or objective is meant only the spatially or physi- cally so, although this special meaning, upon being clearly understood, will prove to be not at all out of accord with the other two, but in what- ever is essential virtually identical with them. Objectivity, as has been intimated more or less definitely already, neither begins nor ends with the sheer existence of things in space, since these are relations, not atoms; nor with the merely true ideas, since mind is the fulfilling activity of relationship, not an isolated function of the self. Still, as said, in order to discover the real unity of the three different meanings, one must take J6 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. the first, which is the simplest or most palpable, and search after what is essential to it. So, as the leading question in this place, What makes the world external? or, What is space? That space is something which the self relies upon and always uses in relating itself to its world, goes without saying; but, curiously enough, there have been many who have had such a purely formalistic notion of what the relating act is that they have imagined the space in which it takes place to be wholly in- dependent of the act itself. Thus they have supposed space an empty but perfectly real something, an actual form in which the world of things finds itself, and man, or any living creature, lives or acts. The obvious fact that any condition of being can never be external to that which is, or that any means to an activity cannot but be a part of the activity, not apart from it, seems wholly to have escaped them. In their theories of knowledge they have been sometimes intuitionalists, sometimes sensation- alists, — the former when they have found their formal space a peculiarity of mind, an a priori form ; and the latter, when, in recognition of the other side of the dualism, which is certainly equally worthy, they have found it a peculiar- ity, a wholly physical or " primary " quality, of THE OUTER WORLD. 77 matter. Still, it has not made any difference at all in which direction they have turned, whether in that of intuitionalism or in that of sensation- alism, since both alike, as doctrines of space, are certainly not less externalistic or formalistic than almost every one to-day knows them to be as doctrines of morals and theology. Of course a few are left who think that the moral law or that God's nature is something in which, and merely in which, the world's creatures have their moral or religious life ; but in general such isolation of the worth of life is satisfying at the present time neither to preachers and reformers nor to scientists. And, in regard to space, whether one studies it ontologically or psychologically, — that is to say, as to its own nature or as to the genesis of one's consciousness of it, — it is found to be very far from a mere form of being or activity. Space is no formal condition of our life, but something essential in our life; no form in which we live, but some- thing that we live. Space, in short, is a living force; it is dynamic, not formal. In the first place, if viewed ontologically, space is a force, not a form; for its parts are relations, and relationship is real only if dynamic. Again and again human thought has tried to compose space out of simple points, 78 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. but the point refuses to be a component part. Simply a space composed of points can have no reality, since either its parts will be separated by intervals, or vacua, and then in space, not space itself, or will be absolutely contiguous, and then, however numerous, without magni- tude singly or collectively. In a space of com- ponent points, too, motion can have no reality, since it would of necessity consist either in a succession of wholly unconnected positions or in a continued rest in some one position. In a space of relations, however, motion is not only possible but necessary, being only the ever actual fulfilment of the relationship. Motion is not in space, but of it. Hence the essen- tially dynamic character of space. But, secondly, to most the psychological evidence of the nature of space is clearer. Psychology finds space, as it were, a force which man applies whenever he acts. Thus, to begin with less technical considerations, in the nature and history of architecture, which depends for its meaning so largely upon spatial character- istics, the dynamic nature of space is unmistak- able. Space is so much material, out of which buildings are made, the peculiar curves and angles determining the shapes into which this subtle material is formed. Curves and angles, THE OUTER WORLD. 79 however, so different for different peoples or for different times, are sure records of life's conditions, be these climatic, geologic, or eco- nomic; as so often said, they are the crystal- lized life of the people whose artists create them. To their great buildings, however, men turn rather for inspiration and motivation than for mere reminiscence. The great work of architecture is a temple whose very curves and angles speak to men of the life that they are actually living. It is, then, no mere place of worship, but itself shares in the life that the worshipper would realize; no form for life, then, but alive itself. The common units of measurement, further- more, are indications that the measured space is a living force. Such units, for example, as the foot, the ell, the cubit, the fathom, the span, the pace, and the finger all give what they measure a dynamic character. Like them, too, in principle are "a stone's throw," "shout- ing distance," "as far as eye can reach," and so on. And a wayfarer, in reply to an inquiry as to how far he has come, says that he has come so far that his legs refuse to hold him ; or some one says to a farmer, perhaps to an advocate of free silver, "How large is your farm ? " and he gives answer, " Large enough 80 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. to be mortgaged, but not large enough to feed a family." Then it is safe to say that children have to gauge their crying to the distance of the nurse. "Nurse was a frightful scream away," the neglected infant may be imagined to say, " and a good deal of kicking too. " And so, in general, space, or quantity in any guise, is never measured abstractly, but always in units of a vital experience, in units of work of some kind. "All quite true enough," some one here interposes, "for primitive life and for ordinary consciousness, but hardly fair to the higher mathematics or to exact, abstractly accurate measurement in any form." Well, possibly; but does not even an exact, abstract mathe- matics have some activity in view? When is measurement, however accurate, without an in- terest in the adjustment of some agent to the means and incidents of his activity ? Accuracy only brings a greater freedom ; it only liberates a greater force. No space is so dynamic as the unerring mathematician's. To put the case somewhat figuratively, or ideally, the course that is exactly so many standard feet in length and of exactly determined grade and curve is the natural course of the well-trained runner, swift-footed and sure-footed. Training and accuracy go together. THE OUTER WORLD. 8 1 How does a child get his consciousness of proportion and general space relationship? At first, in what seems a blind impulsiveness, he fumbles both himself and the things around him; he traces outlines with his fingers; he falls from some one's lap or down the stairs; he creeps in and out and under; until, what with bumps and bruises and other bits of space- wisdom, he comes to give their distinct and relative values to reachable and unreachable, short and long, right and left, up and down, near and far, curved and straight, getting in the end a spatially ordered world. The order presented to his consciousness does but reflect the freedom that he has acquired to move among the ordered things. Indeed, the order and the freedom are identical, the inner mean- ing of his objectively ordered world being his own positive activity. But technical psychological theory, dealing with the problem of space-perception, uses terms that are applicable not merely to the mind of a particular race as active in architec- ture, nor to the mind of the measurer of size or distance, nor to the mind, the mental life of the child learning to reach and walk and ges- ture, but to mind as such, to mind in its most general activity. Thus, technical theory says 6 82 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. something like this. Space is the harmony and realized mechanical relationship in so much of the self's experience as comes through eye, finger, and muscle; so to speak, it is the architectural edifice, not of some special peo- ple's mind, but of mind itself, which relies in its work upon the fundamental conditions of consciousness, the experiences of the various senses, and the ever-present organizing activity which these experiences imply. Space is the relational whole which constitutes the world' s ableness to an organic self that sees and feels and moves; or, to give the psychological doc- trine more directly still, the perception of space results from, or consists in, the association of visual, tactual, and muscular sensations. Of course this association involves at least two things: (i) mechanical relationship among the associated elements, that is, adjustment of all the different elements to some single activity or expression of the self, and (2) symbolization on the part of any element of the meanings or values of the other elements, — on the part of the visual sensation, for example, of the mus- cular and tactual. A space, however, that is so related to the self, or that is perceived under such conditions, must be at least as much a motive as a form of the self's activity; and, if THE OUTER WORLD. 83 a motive, then active itself. So, as remarked above, space is a force, which the self applies whenever it acts; the application of force being identical with the liberation of an activity which only fulfils the organic relationship be- tween the self that applies and the force that is applied. Space, then, as a force is not, and cannot be, separate in its activity from the self. The activity of one is the activity of the other, else there were no dynamic value for the self in space and no consciousness of space on the part of the self. Remember that the self is in and of the body, which is spatial in character, and as of the body is a part of the whole world in space. What creature is not a part of its own environment? Or what environment is not a part of some crea- ture's body? But part really means relation ; and the creature, or self, that is a part of its own environment, or that has in its environment a part of its own body, is in its deeper nature the actuality, the fulfilment or perfection, of a relationship. Such fulfilment, however, must be in an activity which identifies body and environment. So, in conclusion, space being what we have found it, the outer world cannot possibly be an alien world. Were space the mere form that 84 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. some would still have it, distance would have to mean absolute isolation, and distant things would have to be independently substantial ; the outer world would be also another world, distinct in kind, as external to the self as the space in which it existed. But space is a force, being organically one in its activity with the activity of the self; and spatial objectivity, accordingly, must consist in something else than mere dis- tance, depending rather upon the relating activ- ity, in which subject and object are one and inseparable. In short, the objectivity of the outer world is not distinct from that of adjudged or evaluated acts, but identical with it. Spatial or physical objectivity is spiritual also, or the same as worth. In a simple formula spatial separation is only an incident, at once a condi- tion and a result, of organic activity. Biological speculation has reached this con- clusion, too, although in some quarters without any real appreciation of the identity of its thought with that of recent psychology. From its long study of the relation of organism and environment, biology has come to assert the originality of habit or adjustment. Original adjustment, however, means (i) that there is no essentially inorganic or alien environment, and (2) that the existing dualism of organism THE OUTER WORLD. 85 and environment is part and parcel of organic life itself. For biology, then, environment can no longer be imagined to impose a strictly formal life upon organic creatures ; and one can now say of environment, as of space, that it is not a form but a force, not a dead mechanism but a life. " A living mediator," it was called in a former chapter ; and exactly this which in so many words is said of environment by the biologist can be said of space by the psychol- ogist. Space, wherein the self has relation to an outer world, is a living mediator. Benedict Spinoza had his way at least of fore- shadowing the doctrine of original adjustment or of space's or environment's living mediation. His very monism was of course a promise of it; but in one or two of his special utterances he seems to have been extremely happy, and no- tably when he aphoristically suggested that it took a hammer to make a hammer. Here, surely, he put the whole story in a phrase. Thus, the hammer is an important tool in civil- ized life, and has come to be made with wonder- ful skill and used with marvellous accuracy. Its principle, however, is present in all the in- struments of man's activity, so that we might say that all tools are hammers, or even that the outer world as a whole is a hammer. To any 86 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. one having regard for underlying principles, such a generalization can give no difficulty. But, as the wise Spinoza said, it took a hammer to make a hammer. The outer world, then, the world in space, must be a tool, not merely for, but always and originally in, the use of the self. A tool in use, however, is force ; a tool in use lives. CHAPTER VI. THE TWO-FACED OBJECT, OR LANGUAGE. A SUMMARY of the five chapters now completed seems desirable here. It can, however, be very short. Thus : (a) The world of things is a system of rela- tions, and has its substantiality in its relational character, the relations being actual not formal. (b) As a substantial system of relations, the world is active within itself, self-active, animate ; and therefore intelligent as well as intelligible. (V) Change, or difference, is essential to rela- tional character, but always only as fulfilment or substantial expression. The relational uni- verse would not be substantial without change. (d) The animate intelligence that the world is, in other words the living organism, induces by its own activity a constant differentiation within itself, on which rests the dualism of self and not-self, or subject and object, or organism and environment. (e) This dualism, as between two organically related or organically acting factors, is shown 88 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. on one side in the intelligence of the body, and on the other in the distinctly dynamic character of environment, or more narrowly of space. (/) The outer world is a tool originally in the use of the self; an always adaptable tool, then ; nay, this rather, a living mediator. And here the first part of our study might very well close, for as regards principles noth- ing more is to be added. But there is left a certain implication of what has been said that should be brought out, if for no other reason, at least to make the coming transition to the second part, on "The World of Ideas," seem less abrupt. So to this helpful implication let us now turn. The outer world, the world in space, is the "perceived" world, as psychology knows it, or the " natural " environment, as biology knows it; and this world in its unity and wholeness, and particularly in its apparent permanence, answers only to the freedom of action already secured by the perceiver of it. Quite properly has perception been identified with the pe- ripheral organs, whose activities are of a rela- tively permanent character, and mark at once the more habitual life of the individual and the accomplished adjustments of society. The pre- sented unity of the perceived object cannot THE TWO-FACED OBJECT. 89 but reflect the organization that a more or less reflexly acting peripheral system testifies to. Every organism, however, must be itself a singly acting system of individual organisms — or organs — and must accordingly act always in a tension between the already existing and persistently surviving unity of the component parts and the relating and realizing unity of the organic whole; and its consciousness, ac- cordingly, incident to the tension, must invari- ably be of two aspects, being perceptual and naturistic from the standpoint of the unity of the first sort, but conceptual and social from the standpoint of that of the second. This important fact about the organism and its con- sciousness has indeed been touched upon al- ready, 1 when it was said that the object of consciousness was more than mere object, being incident to and accordingly always indi- cative of a social life, and again 2 in the dis- tinction that was drawn between the natural and the social environment. Now, however, the sociological implication in the conscious- ness of an outer world — that is to say, in perception — is still more clearly defined. Con- ception, however, which was just now identified with consciousness, as seen from the stand- 1 See p. 23 sq. 2 See p. 26. go DYNAMIC IDEALISM. point of the realizing unity of the organic whole, has always been regarded, in the first place, as one and the same with individual self-consciousness, and, in the second place, as having for its object a socially universal idea. So we have here only an interpretation of a doctrine of long standing. But, to state the case once more, environ- ment is " natural " and perceived, or " outer," to an individual's consciousness, in so far as its relations to his merely mechanical activity are concerned. This mechanical activity, being " reflex " and representing the acquired ad- justment, naturally seems confined, now to this special organ, now to that ; but in reality it is all the more expressive of the unity of the en- tire organism, because mechanical, and it is, besides, of a positively social value, because the basis of the instinctively social life. Space, for example, is the " natural " environment of the organs of motion, in which the individual lives a well co-ordinated and relatively unconscious life, both within himself and among his fellows. But the mechanical or reflex activity is always in tension with a more central function, which is none other than the fulfilling and therefore always change-bringing organic life itself, and without which there would be no consciousness THE TWO-FACED OBJECT. 9 1 at all. Do but recall that the relations of an individual's organic parts are not formal, but actual. Were they formal, automatism would indeed prevail ; but, being actual, they give to the individual a self-conscious life in addition to the mechanical and a conscious social life in addition to the instinctive, — in short, a social environment in addition to the " natural." In an earlier reference to the outer world, whether in its spatial or in its material character, as a social institution, exactly this two-faced nature of environment was involved. Not for a moment must any one take the meaning here to be that the social and the natural environment are literally distinct. To neither one belongs any special or fixed set of objects. Each, indeed, is always in possibility the other. The two stand for a relationship, not for a mere classification in the world of things. Ordinarily animals are natural to man, and only other men are social, but sometimes the reverse is true; and similarly, in the relation of any higher form of life to a form below it, the social may turn natural or the natural may turn social. The difference is one of organization ; as has been said, it is one of part and whole; and to understand it we need only to reflect upon the very nature of organic life. Thus, even a second 92 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. time in repetition, a living organism must be a singly acting system of individual organisms — or organs — or else, of course, an individual organism — or organ — in a system ; and from this necessity each individual has a two-faced environment, and the organic whole to any one of its parts is always a hierarchy of higher and lower forms. In neither the duplicity of en- vironment, however, nor the order of the hie- rarchy is there any irrevocable fixity other than that required by organic life itself. Manhood, for example, not men, is what makes environ- ment social to man, and men higher than animals. But now, finally, another name, also used before although without the fulness of meaning that is certainly possible now, can be given to the natural or perceived environment, or the outer world. The outer world is essentially linguistic. It is the language through which all the manifold forms in the hierarchy of organisms have intelligible communication, and are so en- abled to lead at once a single and an indefinitely differentiated life. In some special aspects it may seem to mediate only the life of certain special organic forms, as for example in the written and spoken symbols that make human society possible; but, so to speak, there is a hierarchy of languages that is parallel in its THE TWO-FACED OBJECT. 93 relations and functions to the hierarchy of or- ganic groups, and the whole outer world as such has a linguistic value. Even objects that to man's ordinary consciousness are not linguistic, seeming nothing but mere objects, are so in reality to some phase of his activity. Language is a name that only more fully interprets the conception of the outer world as " a tool in use." With the mediaeval logicians, we can see in it a living mediation. But in the development of our present study it is the natu- ral bridge between the world of things and the world of ideas. #at* II. THE WORLD OF IDEAS. CHAPTER VII. IDEAS AS FORMS. IN the chapters just summarized the interest has been chiefly in the world of things, — in the world that was said to have " physical ob- jectivity." But the physically objective world has been found to be of such a character as to be objective, not to a self substantially apart from it, as so often supposed, but to a self belonging to it or organically involved in it. A living mediator, we were able to call it. Now, however, our interest turns to the world of " rational objectivity," the world of ideas. What precisely is the rationally objective? Ideas are often looked upon as the forms, or, to use a sort of metaphor, the " heads," under which things appear to mind. They are thought to be peculiarly the content of mind or the objects of mind. Mind knows, so it is often said, not things but ideas, ideas being quite different in character from things, al- though being at the same time mind's way of relating itself to things. Sensations as well as 98 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. ideas of a higher sort, such as conceptions, are really only forms or heads or peculiarly mental objects, — that is to say, according to a widely accepted psychology. But this prevalent psychology is hardly con- sistent with conclusions that have been reached here about both mind and things. The doc- trine of ideas as forms can obviously keep company only with that of things as separate, merely component individuals and of mind as alien to body. Not under any conditions can it stand with things as relations and mind as the inherent relating activity, which is the very substantiality of things. Of course, in the very fact that two such doctrines as those of formal ideas and of component things can be said to belong together, mind is seen to have been made a function of things, and so to be intrin- sically related to them ; but this is only a logical implication of the doctrines themselves, not a condition recognized by their supporters. And as to the inconsistency with the conclusions of these pages, that does not of itself relieve us of all responsibility to the views in question, since for wholly practical reasons, if for no others, to neglect views that are widely entertained is always a great mistake; and, theoretically, intelligent rejection is a very important part IDEAS AS FORMS. 99 of successful thinking. In successful thinking it seems as necessary to know clearly what is not as to know what is. Here, then, before considering the consistent doctrine of ideas we shall examine carefully the inconsistent one. Perhaps it is not yet clear what is meant by the idea as a form. Is it not, however, clear that ideas, as mind's views of isolated indi- viduals, would have to be, from the standpoint of the individual things, abstract, universal, immaterial? Mind's recognized function is uni- fication, and the things which ideas are sup- posed to unify are denied any unity of their own, under the view before us. The unifying idea, then, cannot but be wholly extrinsic to the unified things; and this extrinsic character makes it " formal." Suppose so common a term as man were applicable to men as unre- lated individuals, society being by nature a mere aggregate of social atoms ; then the idea of man expressed in the term could mean nothing at all beyond implying the existence of a sort of man in general, a universal man, be- longing to an altogether different order of being. Men might belong to earth ; but the type, the universal, in which mind would have interest, could belong only to some unearthly realm. And so of any term, if its application be under 100 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. the same notion of what a group is, one has no choice but to say that so far as indicating a unity in the group it is a mere name, only so much breath; and that so far as having any reality of its own it is real in an absolutely different sphere. Simply, if things are not intrinsically related, then ideas as mind's ways of relating or unifying them must belong to a world quite their own; the world of things and the world of ideas, or, more generally, matter and mind, must be two wholly distinct kingdoms of reality. Furthermore, if ideas have such an alien ex- istence, then are they not only formal, but also interesting merely as so much knowledge, and always expressed in a medium as alien or abstract as they. As formal, they are rather that in which things are known than a knowledge of things themselves ; they have no meaning in recognition of individuality; 1 and they make possible the sort of classification, criticised above, that identifies unlikes and sep- arates likes. Formalism could hardly be better defined than in this way, — unity without regard to differences, or differences undetermined by unity. But, if formal or abstract, ideas must be 1 Unless their formalism be seen as only the other side of atomism. IDEAS AS FORMS. 101 marked " For knowledge only." To have them simply as so much mental treasure can be the only true interest in them. Ever to seek to ap- ply them, or fulfil them in the world of things, would be illogical, self- contradictory, since they have by nature no dealing with the world of things. They are mind's, and mind is of an- other world, and the knowledge of them must have its worth within itself, be for its own sake, since — without contradiction — it cannot be said to have any other end or purpose whatso- ever. Knowledge wholly for knowledge's sake, science wholly for science's sake, is an ideal, a cry not infrequently heard at the present time, and it evidently presupposes that ideas are mere abstract forms, the content of an alto- gether alien mind. Knowing mere knowledge, however, having an abstract consciousness of ideas, has in human life, particularly in education and in training of every sort, a certain value. Thus it always in- volves an almost if not quite exclusive emphasis upon the different media of self-expression. Suppose one were asked to walk a walk, or talk a talk, or look a look, or in general do a deed. In walking a walk one could not be interested in going anywhere or seeking anything, only in walking, that is, in moving the legs ; and, simi- 102 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. larly, in any of the other activities one could live only in the abstracted, unrelated medium of expression. Elocutionists ordinarily do no more than talk talks or speak speeches, and out in society countless people are mere lookers of looks. The value, in short, in knowing mere knowledge is directly proportional to the need of identifying the self with the unmeaning me- dium of activity. Knowers of mere knowledge do learn formulas, rules, precepts; they are masters of apt phrases and storehouses of quo- tations, and perhaps even intellectual gymnasts ; but they are not thinkers. Indeed, whoever knows what he knows and that he knows is always much better as a talker or writer than as a thinker, and much more acceptable, too, to his unreflective and readily marshalled fellows ; but the thinker, greater than any medium or any uniform, never can be quite clear, even to him- self. The thinker is one who rather enacts or applies than merely knows ideas. In a universe, however, of alien or abstract ideas — such as the sensations and the conceptions of the still cur- rent psychological theory — there can be no thinkers, only gymnasts. Schopenhauer, writing more than half a cen- tury ago, was unable to discover in human life any other hope than that of doing mere deeds IDEAS AS FORMS. 103 and knowing mere knowledge, and he drew at once the conclusion that the thinker, as if a duck condemned to live out of water, could have no more ideal act of will than suicide. Whence or how the unfortunate duck came upon the earth the great pessimist failed to ex- plain satisfactorily, but his philosophy is on the whole a very profound comment upon abstract idealism ; and a very fair exemplification of both his premises and his conclusions can be seen to- day in school and church and state, where not only in a doctrinal but also in a practical way intellectual suicide is the rule rather than the exception. The best illustration of the abstract medium, in which formal ideas are expressed, is a dead language. A language is dead in so far as it is the medium of a strange or alien experience. There are other dead languages than Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, and these just named are not dead because Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Any language, any medium of expression, studied me- chanically, — that is, with only a dictionary and grammar or their equivalents, — is dead ; for ex- ample, German and French, as commonly taught. Geometry and Physics are often fairly describ- able as dead languages, for they are not free from mechanical methods, and their objects of 104 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. interest, space and matter, are media of expres- sion. Both in theory and in experiment even psychology has treated matter as the dead lan- guage of the sensuous consciousness. And, in the same wider use of the term, gymnasium ex- ercise, or the athletic cult in all its phases, so prominent a part of recent education, is a dead language. Its being this, too, makes it only a perfectly logical part of a curriculum that in general knows no medium but the unmeaning medium, and no idea but the abstract, wholly vacant form of an absolutely immaterial mind. But there is still another important conse- quence of isolating things from each other and mind from things. If ideas are formal, and so for knowledge only and expressed in a lifeless medium, then also will mind as knowing such ideas require at least two faculties, — the faculty of thought and the faculty of sensation. Through the former will come the consciousness of the ideas themselves, through the latter of the mere medium expressing the ideas ; and the two will be of course as distinct, as different in kind, as their objects. Moreover, as something belong- ing logically to the abstraction of mind, both sensation and thought, each in its special way, will have to transcend its own consciousness, — sensation by being conscious of an insensible IDEAS AS FORMS. 1 05 matter that manifests itself extrinsically in the sensations or sensuous qualities of color, odor, and the like ; and thought by being conscious of ideas that manifest themselves extrinsically in so-called perceptions. In education the dual- ism here indicated has been put into practice, now by exaltation of the " Deductive Method," which emphasizes the consciousness of ideas, and now in exaltation of the " Inductive Method," which would emphasize the consciousness of things or media, — now in principle-lessons, now in object-lessons. Contrary to what seems to be usually supposed, object-lessons, although marking a reaction against principle-lessons, rely upon essentially the same character in mind. Both are dualistic. And to this dualism there is incident also the limitation of consciousness to a few special and distinct organs in the body. Reference has been made to such limitation before. Ob- viously it depends upon, or itself has led to, the abstraction or isolation of the medium of conscious self-expression. It makes the mental life a life quite by itself. And if consciousness is peculiar to a part of the self, then its object, in exact proportion to the partiality, will be abstract; whence that need of the second fac- ulty, the first apprehending the object, the sec- 106 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. ond that for which the object is an abstraction. The second faculty, moreover, the faculty of thought, is assigned a place in the brain, so that the dualism gets a physiological founda- tion in the several organs of sense, on the one side, as the seat of consciousness of the mere medium of expression, and the brain, on the other, as the seat of the consciousness of the mediated ideas. So, finally, as logically one, there are all these different views of the world and mind's relation to it: (i) things isolated or atomic; (2) ideas formal, the objects of an alien mind ; (3) consciousness self-centred, existing only for consciousness' sake; (4) media of expression abstract or lifeless; (5) the faculties of the mind distinctly two ; and (6) the conscious life of the organism confined to certain particular organs, — sensation to the special sense-organs and thought to the brain. These are some of the important doctrines belonging to abstract or formal idealism; and affording us, as they do, so many standpoints, or let us say so many points of attack, they cannot but assist to the understanding of our contentions here for a relational or organic universe and an inherent mind. CHAPTER VIII. HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATION. FORMAL Idealism has had its source in conditions of the past. That the past persisting in the present always makes for- malism, goes without saying, and that formalism itself is real only retrospectively, is also clear. The formal idea and the abstract medium, as they are found in the life of to-day, date back to the beginning of the Christian era, being of a distinctly Christian- Roman origin. They are, in fact, lineal descendants of the revealed or infallible law and the Incarnate Word. Accord- ing to the earlier Christianity, and particularly according to the use that the Roman power made of the habit of mind which Christianity defined and inculcated, the medium of man's self-expression was fixed, given, imposed, abso- lute, divine. Human life, in consequence, was not here, but naturally in another world; not man's own, but God's or Rome's. In Christ, in the Roman emperor, in the written and spoken language, in the very coin of the time, life 108 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. found only an other-world mediation. Roman law and Christian dogma combined to effect what may fairly be called a separation of the individual from himself, making him live apart in an ideal or spiritual somewhere, called the Kingdom of Heaven by the Church and citizen- ship by the State ; and, living there, he became a very good soldier, indifferent to the changes of the world about him, even to death itself. Of course, however, soldiers were the supreme need of the time. The soldier is the very incarnation of Formal Idealism. His mind is not his own, for he is allowed only to know knowledge and do deeds. His individual consciousness and his activity are two distinct things, and his body is medium, not for any deeds of his own, but solely for those of God's Kingdom, of Church and State, in which he trustingly lives, passive even through his greatest activity. In the Christian-Roman militarism, then, the formal idea and the abstract medium of to-day had their rise. But our present consciousness of them as formal and abstract shows that our times are outgrowing them. As the not-self is the past self — witness the doctrine of evolu- tion — so the formal is the outgrown. Society to-day has another conception of mediation than HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATION. 109 the Roman and early Christian, or at least than this as it is seen by the present time. Not Christ's life, but a Christian life, is the burden of the preaching in many pulpits; and the change, which has its parallels in social and political life as well as in scientific theory, does but mark the evolution of the Roman into something besides a soldier. Now to some, perhaps to many, religion and its cherished history will seem degraded by the present declaration of a virtual identity between the religious attitude towards the Word Incar- nate and the secular attitude towards all the different media of every-day life ; but to such religion must be a very small thing indeed. Why not give to religion its accruing tribute? Religion is the supreme education, as it is also the supreme government or the supreme con- trol in general ; for more than any other influ- ence it determines the bent or habit of mind, which manifests itself and has to manifest itself in life as a whole. Men live their religion in their every-day life very much better than is commonly supposed. The much preached ideal is no more and no less than an existing fact, an already realized condition. Indeed, only because already realized, has it any value as an ideal. IIO DYNAMIC IDEALISM. And psychological doctrine does but define the self and its mind in ways that accord with the determining influence of religion. Formal Idealism, therefore, as a psychological theory, only brings to light such relations of man to his world, or more generally of mind to matter, as have been involved in the soldier's or the sol- dier-citizen's life since the opening of the Chris- tian era. Assuredly psychology would fail to be the science of self-expression, if in its history it did not reflect the history of religion. CHAPTER IX. IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. PERHAPS the most severe criticism of For- mal Idealism, as defined in the foregoing chapters, is the criticism from history. Indeed, history is both its justification and its over- throw, since, as remarked before, it is found formal only retrospectively, that is, only as outgrown. The decline of supernaturalism, of militarism, of absolutism in all its forms, in short, of externalism or alien mediation, is his- tory's condemning criticism. And that phi- losophy of Schopenhauer's is a criticism also. One could hardly get a better definition of death than the doing of deeds or the conscious- ness of empty forms. The soldier's natural goal is death ; but history is dispensing with soldiers and using individually responsible laborers in- stead, and the change is bringing, among other things, a new psychology. What this new psychology has to think about the world of things we have seen already. Things are actually, substantially related, — re- 112 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. lated in the way that makes the whole, to which they belong, a living organism. Also we have seen, although indirectly, what ideas are. We have seen what ideas are not. Now, however, we would take the direct view, and ask ourselves this question : If things are rela- tions, what positively are ideas? Whatever else may be said, ideas are states of consciousness, and some of the general characteristics of consciousness, that have been touched upon before, should be recalled. Con- sciousness was shown to be essential to a sub- stantial system of relations, being induced by the inherent self-activity. Thus every part of such a system, every part of an organism, must be subject to a relating activity, and must itself at the same time contribute to the activity, the subjection and the contri- bution being but incidents of the self-activity by which the organism as a whole is realized. This necessity, however, carries with it a tension, the tension of adjustment, since each part seeks to fulfil an individual adjustment to the whole, or the whole to express its organic nature in the part; and such tension is consciousness. Consciousness, then, is the tension of individual expression, — that is, of differentiation — that organic life must always induce. IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. 113 But if this be the nature of consciousness, it follows at once that the condition of being con- scious cannot possibly result from any peculiar power or property of any individual organ in an organism. The subjected and contributing part is not conscious in and of itself alone, as the Formal Idealist would have it. On the contrary, consciousness is an interactive func- tion or product, involving all parts. An organ- ism, then, as has been contended before, not any separate organ, is conscious ; and conscious within itself, not of anything external to it ; and again, in and with its activity, not before nor yet after activity. Consciousness and activity, having the same basis, cannot be two. Ideas, accordingly, as states of consciousness, are dynamic. They are forces, not forms. In a similar sense, space has been said to be a force, not a form. The simplest idea that psy- chology has to deal with is the sensation. More complex ideas are the perception and the con- ception. First, however, of sensation. Partic- ular colors, tastes, sounds, smells, and the like are sensations ; and again and again these have been defined as the elements of knowledge, as only the material out of which mind builds its ex- periences ; but, apart from other equally serious objections, this definition does not accord with 8 114 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. the evidence of recent experiments. Mind does not build its objects out of sensations as "sim- ple ideas ; " but sensations are, in the first place, induced by the activity of mind, and are, in the second place, relationally one, not individually exclusive. The Law of Relativity, specially applicable to the sensuous consciousness, has been discussed already; and it is to be inter- preted as showing more than anything else that consciousness is vitally incident to a relating activity. The simple sensation, then, is not knowledge, in the sense of being an element; it is not in itself consciousness at all. What, then, is it? Why, there is no simple sensation. The sensation talked about is but an epistemolo- gist's abstraction or indirection for the source or basis of knowledge ; namely, for actual rela- tionship or organic activity. At times the epis- temologist, although throughout blinded into thinking of knowledge as a thing quite by itself, has got so far as to say that pure sensations were not knowledge themselves, but only the antecedent stimuli of the mind's life; but this, at best, is to go only half-way to the real truth. Sensation is real not even as external stimulus. Not we have sensations, whatever their function be said to be, but the consciousness of an organ- ism is sensuous. IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. 1 15 Higher in the scale are perceptions. These are commonly distinguished as the ideas of individual things, of single wholes, in the outer world. One perceives a chair, a book, a man; and each one of these perceptions com- prises a large complex of sensuous qualities, such as color and touch, but withal an ordered or relational or organic complex. The per- ceived world, as a whole, is the entire sphere of the consciousness of things in space, the world in general that we have about us with all its manifold parts. But ordered complexes correspond to co-ordinated activity. A free activity is only the realization of order; or, conversely, order is the possibility of freedom. 1 For example, to be almost as commonplace as Aristotle, when he said that things were visible by reason of their visibility, only sitters per- ceive chairs, only readers are conscious of books, and in general only those who are able to move are aware of a world in space. The perceived world, then, in so far as a whole, in so far as having any fixity or permanence or order, in so far as real, is but consequent upon or correspondent to, if not indeed identical with, an acquired freedom of activity. The real perception is but the outer mark or the 1 Cf. pp. 81-83. Il6 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. language of a habit, since belief is never in anything that does not answer to some freedom of the self; or, again, wholeness or complete- ness or individuality can belong only to that which mediates activity. Not things, but tools — that is, real media of self-expression — are whole and individual ; and perception is of tools or media. But the perceived world in general is a broken whole, being made up of many wholes instead of being a single whole itself. It is compar- able with one's study, where books, papers, pictures, and pieces of furniture are more often the media of apparently separate activities than the single medium of one activity. The mul- tiplicity, however, or the differentiation, is not essential to the things themselves; and the activities, albeit apparently unrelated or ran- dom, are still those of a student seeking a realer expression of himself. The multiplicity is evidence or earnest of a single organizing activity quite as truly as of many separate activities. Indeed, as has been pointed out before, separation is indispensable to the action of an organism, and is even induced by it. There is no unity without plurality. In the study books and chairs and other things are properly distinguished only by a student, and IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. WJ in the general world of perception distinctions only mark the organic life, always with some struggle or tension, of an individual. But, further, every individual is one of the distinguished things. Even men are things, distinct from other men, or from animals or plants or clods of earth. True, a man has a greater individual power over nature than an animal or a clod, but this means no more and no less than that a man is the single organized activity of a larger, more complex group of things. A man is still a relational part of the whole. His greater power, instead of isolating him, only relates him more closely, and his activity only realizes him as an organ of the whole. It is to be remembered, moreover, that animals and plants and clods have their peculiar characters rather for him than in themselves. And, if perception is of the individual wholes of experience, of the wholes that mediate co- ordinated activity, conception is the organizing activity that underlies the differentiation of the wholes and seeks the fulfilment of their unity or relationship. A conception is thus rather an act than an object of consciousness. Unity, in fact, could never be anything else but an act. As an object in the ordinary sense, it is absolutely impossible. Perceptions are Il8 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. objects only because of the conceptual activ- ity, the organizing activity, with which they are always in tension. Thus words are percep- tions from the standpoint of the activity that would reduce them to a complete sentence ; and sentences from the standpoint of a relation in a still wider experience. But — and here is an important point — the two, perception and con- ception, are inseparable; nay, they are organi- cally one. Of course, conceptions have often been looked upon as distinct contents of mind, as independently real objects; but such a view of them, now quite out of the question, was nec- essary, only because mind was supposed to be something peculiar and apart, and unity, accord- ingly, to be extrinsic to the world of things. To-day conceptions may be called objective, but they are not objects. They are "spirit- ually" objective. The distinction between perception and con- ception is parallel to that, with which we have become familiar, between natural and social environment. Just as natural environ- ment is a social institution, so the world of perceptions is symbolic of conception, being the language or medium of the conceptual activity. Conception, in other words, is essentially a social function. And, to men- IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. 1 19 tion another circumstance not less significant to the lines of thought that have been pursued here, the three stages of knowledge, — sensa- tion, perception, and conception, — as they have usually been described, are not stages at all, but are organically one and so contemporaneous, being abstracted aspects of the organic whole, which mental life comprises. Sensations, as was asserted above, are induced by the very activity of mind, being under no conceivable circumstances the given elements or materials of mind's activity; and perceptions, in their turn, are incident to the tension in organic life, which is the activity of mind, between existing habits of action and the underlying relating activity, or, say, between unities and unity or organs and organism. 1 Now do we see still more clearly, still more conclusively, that ideas, as mind's so-called objects, are forces, not forms. For the earlier psychology sensations were formal, because given elements of knowledge ; and perceptions, because of external things or wholes; and con- ceptions, because of abstract universals: but psychology to-day finds them all organically one, and at the same time vitally incident to 1 See " The Stages of Knowledge," in Psychological Review, March, 1897. 120 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. the activity of the self. They are, indeed, mind's; but mind is itself the substantial force, the dynamic reality, that a relational universe requires for its very integrity. In applying the term " force " to the idea, or to mind, we shall doubtless meet with hostile demonstrations from certain physical scientists. Still it is not impossible that physical science has been talking about forces without thinking very deeply about them. Certainly it seems rather strange for anybody to suppose that forces are material when no force was ever discovered that did not manifest, at least with some definiteness, a recognized law. The fact that forces are always lawful — else not discovered — ought to suggest either that they are not material or that matter is not what the abstracted scientist would have it. As a matter of truth, however, science has always been better than its language, really meaning by force the manifestation of an activity incident to the relations of things. Thus we are often told that heat expands and cold contracts; but we know, and those who tell us mean, that expansion is heat and that contraction is cold, or, more generally, that heat is only a mode of motion, motion itself being the expression and substantiation of existing relationship. Mat- IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. 121 ter, then, is not dynamic; only relationship is dynamic, unless matter itself be nothing but relationship; and forces are not material or abstractly physical, but are as psychical as ideas. Forces are themselves ideas, just as ideas are forces. Many pages ago 1 this state- ment was made : " Not only are things related, but in them and of them exists a relating activ- ity, which is mind." By physical science the same mind is known as force. In the world as an organism, in a self-active system of actual relations, matter and mind are not two but one. Modern physics and modern chemistry, by their use of mathematical formulae, of curves and of figures of all sorts, have blown their physical elements, their molecules and their atoms, into absolute nothings, or rather into the most imagi- nary abstractions for something fundamentally different. Psychology, however, as we have seen, has experienced a similar explosion, and physical science and psychical science have proved to be only indirections for each other. The latter has studied the conscious self; the former, the changes in an outer world or not-self; but con- sciousness has proved to be intrinsic to the very process that has been found in the outer world. 1 Pp. 45 ff. 122 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. Forces, as not blind, and ideas, as not formal, are identical ; and the sciences concerned with them are looking at the same reality, only from op- posite sides. Thus, they see action but from the opposites, force and law, and freedom but from the opposites, nature and will, and spirit but from the opposites, body and mind. Thinking of either one, of physical or of psychical science, and of its long and persistent abstraction, I seem to see a man standing with his back to a mirror and so unable to recognize himself, his own back, in the reflected image behind him. If only he would become less abstracted and turn around fairly and squarely; if only psy- chology and physical science would once for all face each other ! So, then, ideas are forces. A word, however, in popular discourse, expresses very well the true nature of an idea. The word is plan. Ideas are plans, and consciousness is always a plan- ning. As plans, ideas are sure to become motives, for they accompany and mediate, not a coming activity, but an already present activ- ity. As plans, then, ideas are forces. What is planning but a process wherein manifold things, of which the planner is himself one, as- sume such an expression of their relations as will set activity free? CHAPTER X. ILLUSTRATIONS FROM EDUCATION. UNDER the control of a Dynamic Idealism educational methods must differ widely from what they are or have been under Formal Idealism. A few words, then, additional to what has been said incidentally already, in re- gard to the changes, cannot but be of some interest here, since they will at least serve the purposes of illustration. Consistent with Formal Idealism we have found (i) the pursuit of knowledge solely for knowledge's sake; (2) instruction in dead lan- guages, that is, in wholly abstract and unmean- ing media of expression ; (3) preference either for principle-lessons or for pure object-lessons ; and (4) compulsion. In a word, under Formal Idealism, education is naturally a discipline, not an interest; a preparation for something else, not in itself a vocation. To see education in this light, however, is to imply that a change has already set in. Consciousness of the old comes only with the assertion of the new. In 124 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. fact, consciousness — and this is but a sort of summary of the preceding chapter — sets the new free in the old. But, to put the new aside for a moment, and enlarge a little upon the old, knowledge for knowledge's sake as an ideal in school methods, carries with it the slavish use of single text- books, the cultivation of memory as a distinct and peculiarly valuable faculty, the evolution of teachers into military directors or masters of a routine, the resort to rewards and punishments, such as prizes, tasks, and the like, to secure attention, and the complete separation of bodily exercise and intellectual activity. Upon this general plan it is no wonder that in social life, in business, church, and state, the intellectual suicides are so numerous. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is bound to make stupid men. In a curriculum of dead languages a separa- tion of subjects is inevitable ; and among these subjects, or among the men devoted to them, a competitive individualism is bound to prevail. In the competition, moreover, what above was referred to as the dead language of athletics has its perfectly natural and appropriate place. The body must be exercised, and Formal Ideal- ism finds no exercise of the body in the thought life, as well as no thought in the body life. ILLUSTRATIONS FROM EDUCATION. 125 University faculties are often disturbed over the problem of requiring physical exercise, and of making this a recognized part of the prep- aration for a degree; but if they teach dead languages, and cherish isolated instead of organ- ized departments, and impose certain required courses of study, they have no reason to hesi- tate a moment. Compulsory gymnastics goes with compulsion in any other line. Legs and arms should be compelled to work as well as eyes and ears. Again, some of the noteworthy incidents of the compulsion that is natural to Formalism, are the following: (1) the tradition of a school- age, as if the child had no mind until reaching a certain year ; (2) the subjection of all pupils to one line; (3) the measurement of work in terms of hours, weeks, and years ; and (4) di- vision of the whole course into periods unrelated to each other, — as, for example, into the kinder- garten period, when the pupil plays ; the school period, when he laboriously accumulates facts and, as one has put it, learns how to learn ; and the university period, when, in spite of his long- induced blindness, he undertakes " original in- vestigations," at last learning or seeming to learn for himself. And, to conclude this account of the old in 126 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. education, Formalism has naturally assumed that persons without the use of the organs of sight and hearing are not capable of education ; the other recognized senses — smell, taste, and touch — being supposed to have practically no intellec- tual value. Such an assumption, of course, is of a kind with the dogma that a thinker must know German, or that an author must read Greek, or that the reading of some particular book is necessary to culture. But the fact stands out clear to-day that sensation is not confined to the traditional five senses, nor intellect by any means to the two higher of them, sight and hearing. The remarkable success and the rapid development of schools for the blind and deaf signify the mistake and consequent decline of Formalism. A soldier's mind may be narrowed to eyes and ears, but not that of the modern laborer. Now, under Dynamic Idealism, which is the new, act-studies are the only natural ones. In act-studies there can be no confinement of the student's self. His education, narrowed to no particular organs, to no particular periods, to no particular subjects, is but a stimulation of his natural impulse to plan the liberation of his ac- tivity. Ideas that define to him the actual con- ditions of his natural expression, that are true ILLUSTRATIONS FROM EDUCATION. 12? to him because setting him free, are the only ideas that can be given him, because the only ones that he will receive. To suppose the intention here to be to exalt the so-called technical schools, to make the schools of the mechanical arts the only com- mendable ones, is wholly to misunderstand what has been said. The meaning throughout has been, not that only the practical sciences, or so- called " arts," have worth, but that science in itself is practical, that theory should be recog- nized as often more practical than practice. The natural purpose of theory, whether in a university or in a technical school, is to save men from the retrogression that is always in- volved in being practical. Theory, as actually defining the conditions of real life, is practical in the extreme. Anything else, indeed, is not true theory, but sheer conventionalism busy- ing itself with intellectual gymnastics. The many dead languages that formalists study, the so-called " practical " men mechanically use. Dynamic Idealism, however, enjoins a more prac- tical study and a more theoretical use. The claim is often advanced that science for practical ends is inaccurate. The workman, it is said, is satisfied with a rule of thumb, while only the student feels the true worth of accu- 128 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. racy. But how absurd such a contention as this is ! One needs only to work a little to find its folly. Success in work is always dependent upon accuracy. Free expression of self can- not be realized without it. Set a student to solve one of the old-time wall-paper problems in the old-time way, his book and its rules before him, and the chances are that he will make a mistake ; but give him a room to paper and make the labor also an intimate and organic part of some still larger interest, and accuracy will take care of itself. Present psychology, then, is simply insisting that education must find some way of applying in its methods the irrefutable fact that real knowledge is born and bred with action, interest being only in what one is doing, and ideas being only plans of the existing activity. CHAPTER XL BODY, MIND, SOUL. THE division of the self into three parts, body, mind, and soul, or the physical, the mental or rational, and the spiritual, can no longer escape our recognition and most careful consideration. The recent identification of force and idea, or matter and mind, as well as much in the earlier discussions, has made attention to the three parts of the self absolutely necessary. Without an explicit interpretation of the division, further progress in this study would be out of the question. The self has had three parts since the begin- ning of self-consciousness, and it is safe to say that the different parts have always been charac- terized in essentially the same ways. In current thought, particularly among more popular ideas, body is the composite, divisible, destructible, in which life may appear, but to which life is not intrinsic ; mind, quite distinct from body, is the law, universal and formal ; and soul is the sub- stantial, immaterial, and indivisible, free and in- 9 130 DYNAMIC IDEALISM, destructible, the source at once of the body's life and of the mind's will. This characterization, however, is only a restatement of the main doctrines of Formal Idealism, so that it must be greatly modified to be in line with more recent views. Historically we of the Christian era refer the view of the soul as simple and immaterial to the beginning of Christianity; but also, as was shown above, Formal Idealism in its entirety takes the same reference. With the downfall of the civilizations about the Mediterranean, with the decay of social life and individual character, with the decline of long-cherished institutions, religious and political, in short, with the decom- position that had infected human affairs on every side, there seemed to be possible no other conception of the world and its manifold interests than that of unsubstantiality, divisibility, destruc- tibility. For reality, accordingly, men had to look somewhere else, off in another world, the complete negation of this one, a world immaterial and eternal ; and to this other world was supposed to belong a corresponding other part of the self, also immaterial and eternal. Even Plato in his day had felt this movement in human thought. Thus, he proved the soul's immortality through an insistence on the natural permanence of the BODY, MIND, SOUL. I31 simple or indivisible. That which has parts can perish, he said in so many words ; but the soul is without parts, one and indivisible. Still Chris- tianity gave the supreme emphasis to Plato's idea, proclaiming the existence and permanence of the indivisible, placing it in another world, and isolating man from his living self so long as he remained in this. The Christian proclamation also made mind or knowledge formal, and so arbitrary, and body a negation at once of mind and of soul. Body was a negation of mind in so far as composite, and of soul in so far as mortal or unsubstantial. But the separation of body and mind and soul only shows a misunderstanding, as it were a hasty judgment, of what composition and decomposition are ; and the history of Christian- ity is a slow but certain correction of the misconception. The antithesis of the compos- ite and the simple has a much deeper, yes, a much more spiritual meaning than that of an absolute division of the self. True, the com- posite may decompose, but decomposition is nothing more nor less than the differentiation that an activity, fulfilling something in the very nature of the parts themselves, induces. Decomposition is the unmistakable sign of organic life, that is to say, of the change that 132 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. we have found natural in a world of substantial relations. Accordingly, instead of testifying to the reality of a life apart from what is found to be composite, it is a mark of a life, simple and abiding, that claims even decomposition for its own ; and this life, in and of the composite, is the Soul. The ancient civilization crumbled as the mod- ern arose, the passing of the one finding its inner interpretation in the building of the other. In individual activity, moreover, essentially the same stages and phases of experience that are disclosed in history are manifest. No individ- ual ever fully expresses himself without making his past composite. The decomposition, or disintegration, is necessary, in order that the act itself, as an organic adjustment to the differ- ent present, may be liberated. All expression demands or involves a constant rearrangement of its incidents, a reorganization of its medium, and the rearrangement makes " decay." Natur- ally enough, too, the agent at a certain moment in the process takes the negation, that the decay implies, literally. He sees it as an absolute negation, and feels in consequence an isolation from himself, a complete division of himself. As has been suggested, Christianity came when the feeling of isolation was very general. The BODY, MIND, SOUL. 133 negation, however, is not literal. Life is in very truth the deeper meaning of death. In practice the isolation of the parts of the self has the effect of turning the body into a mere mechanism, into a system of parts only formally related and so without activity of its own, and also, not now to speak specially of mind, of turning the soul into an arbitrary agent, which through an absolute will commu- nicates movement to an otherwise helpless body. A society of selves so transformed becomes a material body, too, a mechanical whole, subject to an arbitrary will, which resides in such an individual or in such individuals as can exercise the most physical force. Of course arbitrary will is only another name for physical force. Where will is arbitrary, as always when belong- ing to an isolated soul, might makes right. But the body, individual or politic, turned into a mere mechanism, becomes in reality but one part among many of the whole material world, so that the change, with its accompanying with- drawal of the self, is in point of fact a way of expressing more fully the part's relation to the whole. The separation, then, brings complete identification. The arbitrary control, or as the same thing the subjection of the body to the play of physical forces, there being no activity 134 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. possible to the body from within, really does but liberate a fulfilling activity. In fact, too, the apparently deserted body moves to its ac- tivity by no means so aimlessly and irrespon- sibly as has often been supposed ; the control of its movements has been by no means so exter- nal and arbitrary. Arbitrary control is only another name for subjective indifference, and indifference is a very distinct, a very positive form of will. The abstraction of self, to which the indifference is due, is a complete sanction of the force and arbitrariness; or, in other words, the force itself is the real soul or spirit. Instead of being two things, then, force and spirit, body and soul, are one. Imperial Rome was founded upon their unity, and individual experience relies upon it. That the two, even while they seem opposite, are really one, is shown by the outcome of their opposition. With the ensuing activity, whether produced by the will of indifference or produced by external force, the supposedly isolated self returns to the medium of its ex- pression, finding itself, after all, not the negation of its body, but the deeper affirmation of it, the fulfilling essence of it. Thus, politically, mili- tarism or social mechanicalism and supernatur- alism have together been but the forerunners of BODY, MIND, SOUL. 1 35 a democratic industrialism and naturalism ; and, psychologically, sensationalism and intuitional- ism have preceded a dynamic relationism. Both politically and psychologically the spiritual has returned to this world, as the Prophet of Chris- tianity in his own person predicted it would. How now to distinguish body and mind and soul, if they are not three separate selves, may seem to some a serious problem ; but the dis- tinctions are simple enough. Body, as distinct, is only an abstraction for the self's manifoldness or differentiation; mind, for the unity of the self; and soul, for the substantial reality. The manifold is at bottom the relational and dy- namic, and its relational character is mind, while the dynamic character is soul. The self has a soul because self-active. Were body merely composite, its parts being only formally related, then life and soul would not be intrinsic to it, and decomposition would be absolute death; but body is organic. Life, then, is a property of it. Moreover, the criteria of life, peculiar property of body, and of consciousness, pecu- liar to mind, and of substantiality, peculiar to soul, are absolutely the same. Where any one is, there also are the other two. At the very beginning of this book, 1 where the self was 1 P. 16. 136 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. variously defined, now as a defined force, now as an animate intelligence, and now as a re- sponsible agent, the unity of the three parts of the self was involved. Here, however, the self's unity is made quite explicit. To the theories of evolution or to biological science generally this fundamental conception of Dynamic Idealism — namely, the conception of the unity of body, mind, and soul — cannot but be very welcome. Still there are many scientists even to-day who, in spite of their avowed hos- tility to the theological dogma of another world or of an isolated selfhood, have retained the very standpoint to which they object. Witness such assertions as the following, sometimes made di- rectly and openly, sometimes only implied : — (a) The environment to which organic life seeks adjustment is essentially alien, adjustment being secured to it only by chance, which, plainly, is the scientist's substitute for miracle or external mediation, and continued only by the habit of literal repetition, the substitute for ritual or cult. Before adjustment the organism is in itself a mere trembling, unguided life, a mass of random impulses, in short, not an organ- ism at all and certainly not alive; and after adjustment it leads a life not naturally its own, in fact, a life of another world. BODY, MIND, SOUL. 137 (b) The process of evolution has a creative power of its own, soul as something quite differ- ent being evolved from matter, or again con- sciousness as a distinct and novel function appearing at a certain particular time in the process of growth and self-consciousness, also distinct and novel, at a later time, and, accord- ing to some, God-consciousness or " cosmic " consciousness at a time later still. Obviously this differs from theological creationism only in placing matter temporally before soul or mind instead of after. The isolation of the parts of the self is not less final in the " scientific " than in the theological conception. Roth are dual- istic, formalistic, supernaturalistic. (c) Inheritance is of acquired characters ; or, as one might very well put it, inheritance is literal. This doctrine, not now so popular as formerly, but still in question, plainly involves an isolation of the self from itself, for it is funda- mentally deterministic. It is quite in accord with the view that environment is alien, and that adjustments are continued through the habit of literal repetition. Under its sway the evolu- tional series would have to be in parts differing in kind, since difference on any other plan would be out of the question. Inheritance of acquired characters means caste in nature quite as con- I38 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. clusively as it means caste in human society; and the three principal castes that it has de- termined are those that correspond to the three parts of the self, — the physical, the intelligent, and the spiritual. (d) The group, or class, is a community, hav- ing a basis of union that is independent of the differences in the individual members. This means, of course, that types are persistent or immutable; and it is plainly of a piece with the other doctrines mentioned here, — with envi- ronment as alien and with adjustment as secured by chance or miracle and continued by mere repetition, with creation or evolution as sudden or arbitrary, and with inheritance as literal. In these ways, then, among many others, science has taken to itself the very standpoint against which it is supposed to have reacted. Perhaps, however, reaction always requires a counter-reproduction of what has offended ; but, be that as it may, science at the present time appears to be quite as much at war with itself as with theology, for from many sides it is all but ready to declare that environment is not alien but natural, being vitally one with the organism or self, and that both a habit of literal repetition and an inheritance of acquired char- acters are impossible, adjustments being con- BODY, MIND, SOUL. 1 39 tinued by an organic expression that involves change, and that causation is rather a matter of interaction than of creative action or independ- ent reaction, and, finally, that the group is a single, living organism, not a community. Science, accordingly, as was said above, can- not but welcome the conclusion of psychology, as here presented in the name of Dynamic Idealism, that body and mind and soul are one, not three. This unity is itself the inner meaning of the rising scientific conceptions. But there remains for consideration here a very important doctrine. Perhaps it should be called a belief; but, whatever we call it, the immortality of the soul is an essential part of human consciousness, and although the conser- vation of matter and the eternity of truth have long been positive convictions among men, the soul's immortality has been, and is still com- monly supposed to be, impossible without a complete independence both of body and of mind. In the face of this supposition, what can we say? Two things can be said very promptly. In the first place, science has been in error, and in some measure at least has confessed itself so, whenever it has assumed that matter as conserved and matter as a distinct substance, 140 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. abstractly physical, were ideas that could stand together; and, in the second place, the reli- gious consciousness has been in error, whenever it has allowed itself to think that individuality was solely an affair of physical determinations. A conserved matter is force, not matter, and it has come to be so recognized. The doctrine of material conservation never really referred to the constancy of a sum of any observed parts of the physical world, but only to that of the sum of the world's parts in the abstract. With this latter reference, however, it has been- nothing but an indirection for the fact that parts are relations and that relationship is dynamic; it has been simply a blind way of admitting to one's thought about the world the intelligence and the spiritual substantiality of matter, or to give even another name, a secret door for escape from dualism or a physical sub- stitute for soul or mind. And, on the side of the religious consciousness, a disposition to in- direction and substitution is not less apparent. Religion also has had its secret way out of dualism, its hidden door in the panelling of its sanctuary. Thus, bodily isolation as the mark of individuality and immortality as dependent upon absolute separation from the physical are but counterparts of the scientist's doctrines that BODY, MIND, SOUL. 14 1 matter is a separate substance, and that it is conserved in its sum total ; and just as the con- servation saves matter from being abstractly physical, so the immortality saves individuality from being limited to an isolated body. If conservation is a physical, then immortality is a spiritual, indirection for the fact that bodies, or parts, or, in general, that individuals, are not mere component elements but relations. In short, conserved matter and immortal soul are one and the same reality; or, as doctrines, one and the same truth. A conserved matter is not abstractly physical, and an immortal soul is not abstractly spiritual ; but both are ways — each one of which supports and corrects the other — of recognizing that in its relational or organic character both the universe as a whole and the individuality that relationship involves are substantial and abiding. Relationships, not bodies, are immortal ; and what is any one of us, as an individual, but a relation ? Now, reducing the foregoing to a simple sum, we get the following. Were the material composite, the immortal would have to be immaterial, since decomposition in the material would necessarily bring death ; but the material is in reality organic, as both science and the- ology have indirectly conceded, and decompo- 142 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. sition, accordingly, is a mark of continued life. In the sense, then, of matter as organic, a sense in which the physical and the rational and the spiritual are one, the soul is both material and immortal, or immortal because material. The composite must die, but organ- ism never dies. Individual organs, too, as mere physical parts, are constantly passing away, but not as relations. The organic is immortal, even under Plato's standards, since it is simple and indivisible; but it is simple and indivisible, not in the sense of a direct negation of the divisible, but in the sense of unity or sim- plicity as real through difference and division, that is, in the deeper sense that identifies the part and the whole, the many and the one. Certain recent biologists have also said that organism never dies; and although they have been thinking of particular very minute forms, so minute in fact as to have only a hypothetical existence, yet their teachings have implied the same notion of immortality as has been offered here. They have but confused the immortality of a hypothetical part with that of what such a part really stands for in their own theories, the organism as a whole in its essential character. Their immortal form is only a physical abstrac- tion for the immortality of the organic. Less BODY, MIND, SOUL. 1 43 perhaps than any other " objective " science is biology hampered by the assumption that real- ity is composite, or, as the other side of this assumption, that unity is external to things; but even biology has been making obviously wrong uses of division, expecting quantitative or physi- cal analysis to pass for qualitative analysis. Not, then, until it is ready to look to the whole, in- stead of to the minute part, for the " vital unit," or at least to see the whole in the part that it hy- pothetically talks about, can it even hope to find any satisfactory solutions of its many problems. But as to immortality in Relationism or Dy- namic Idealism, we have not found the denial that at first thought might have been expected. Dynamic Idealism, although identifying matter and spirit, still holds that the individual, in re- spect to just that which makes him substantial, in respect to his relationship, is immortal. The individual's immortality, however, is not in a life in some other place ; it is not, as some Chris- tians still imagine, in a Heaven located they know not where, nor, as metempsychosis has put it, in other unsuspected parts of the known universe ; it does not depend at att upon a mere change of place. Instead of being an escape, complete or partial, from this world's responsi- bilities, it is the ever-deepening expression of 144 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. ever-present relations, of an ever-assertive char- acter. In certain respects metempsychosis is a more inspiring conception of immortality than complete translation; but, after all, its diffi- culties to the thinker are not essentially differ- ent. Thus, from the start it presupposes an absolute separation of soul and body, and it assumes that individuality is physically deter- mined, death consisting in passing from one particular body to another wholly distinct. Its inspiring character consists in its implied asser- tion that the soul has a real and final depend- ence, if not upon a body, at least upon body as such. In human history, too, metempsy- chosis, in one form and another, has been taught, when such movements as distant coloni- zation and as far-reaching conquest have been going on ; and although these movements may seem to be only the passing of an unchanging character, national or individual, from one place to another, or the subjection of a peculiar life to altogether new ways and new institutions, still underneath, as every thoughtful historian to-day is convinced, the new life is but a natural out- come, a true realization of the force or motive in the old. 1 What was said of travel pages ago 1 In another book, in many ways supplementary to this one, I have undertaken to interpret history in the way sug- BODY, MIND, SOUL. 1 45 can be said here of metempsychosis, or of col- onization or conquest. It is only " the fulfil- ling expression of already existing relations ; " it is a staying at home even while one moves away, a freedom even at the time of subjec- tion, a being here even in passing yonder. And the same must be said also, by way of interpretation, even of the Christian's im- mortality. The Kingdom of Heaven is here and now. Immortality is as much before death as after it. The real self is in a natural, an original adjustment to the true sphere of its activity. The primary purpose of this chapter, how- ever, was not to discuss immortality, but to define precisely and explicitly the unity of body, mind, and soul, which had been such an important implication in all that had preceded. The question of immortality forced itself upon us because it was necessary to meet the most serious objection that could possibly be raised to the discovered union. So now, having met the objection, we find, in summary of the main discussion of the chapter, that body is the relational as manifold, and mind the relational gested here. See " Citizenship and Salvation, or Greek and Jew : A Study in the Philosophy of History." Little, Brown & Co., 1897. 10 146 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. as one, and soul the relational as substantial. In these characterizations the three so-called parts of the self are made absolutely one. In the relational as the organic the three are one. 1 1 In an appendix to this chapter, beginning on page 227, I have given in outline a special study of the subject of immor- tality. In regard to this subject interest is always so keen, and the danger of misunderstanding is so great, that it seemed altogether desirable to present a second treatment, complete in itself and formally independent of that in the text CHAPTER XII. TIME. THE recent discussion of immortality, or of the relation of body, mind, and soul, has of course implied a very definite doctrine of time, so that the transition from the previous chapter to the present one will not seem sudden. Dualism and its blood-relation Formalism have no choice but to regard time, like space, as a form in which the consciousness of things, and particularly the consciousness of self, occur. They see the past and the future as literally here- tofore and hereafter, respectively, the different parts of time being absolutely distinct. For them, both as to its wholeness and as to its parts, time is quite external to the content of consciousness. But Relationism, able to say, as we have seen, that the hereafter is also here, has a widely different view. Relationism finds time as well as space dynamic, believing it to be involved in the process to which the events I48 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. in it belong, and so to be something more than a sum of unrelated periods or than a single very long period for the mere reception of events from without. Many people, it is true, seem often to live as if events were only in time, what is past and what is future having nothing at all to do with what is present ; but such people have no real time-consciousness. Really to be conscious of time is to use time, to live with it as well as in it; and a used time is certainly not formal. The human machine — that is to say, the poor slavish official, whose activity is rather another's than his own — lives in time and without any consciousness of it; or, if he be conscious of it, he is so because some interest of his own conflicts with that of his employer. In such a consciousness, however, he is using time as means to an end ; and, in general, for the active self time is one of the resources applied to the end of self-expression, — so to speak, one of the things done. A lived time, a used time, is obviously dynamic. But a good deal more than this needs to be said; for so much is hardly satisfactory, even if its meaning be at once apparent. We must therefore turn to psychology, which has busied itself a good deal with certain facts about time and our consciousness of it. These facts will TIME. I49 all be found to be strong witnesses against the dualistic or formalistic doctrines. As straws telling the direction of the wind, there are the recognized dependence of the consciousness of time on rhythm, and the sim- ple circumstance that memory is only a special way of viewing some present condition or dis- turbance. But of peculiar interest and value are the following paradoxes : (1) the real, the ex- perienced present is the sum of two unrealities, a little past and a little future; (2) an empty time is no time; (3) a rilled time is timeless; and (4) an explained series in time — that is, an explained history or an explained evolution — is no longer a series. These paradoxes, to which in order our attention now turns, will all prove to mean the same thing, as if they were four roads leading to Rome. The interval of time known as present or now must, strictly speaking, be in itself a zero, having no duration at all. The now or present, in other words, is not a part of time, even as a mere point is not a part of space. Conscious- ness, however, recognizes a present, which by some writers has been styled the " specious " present, including a little past and a little fu- ture. Hence the paradox that the present, real to consciousness, is the sum of two unrealities. 150 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. But the meaning of this is, in the now well- worn phrase, that time is not composite but relational. Thus, in view of the relational char- acter, past and future have to be parts of the present; which is only another way of saying that time is nothing if apart from the things in it, since the things refuse to be isolated from each other. Some experimental psychologists have been thoughtful or foolish enough to measure the "specious" present, finding its length to vary from four or five to as many even as twelve seconds ; but the " specious " present is something other than a quantity. Every activity has its now, or present, the length of which is determined by the degree in which the means to the action are organized for realization of the end. The absolute now would be the present of any perfectly organized act, and all eternity of the complete activity of which any act is a relational part The con- scious self, furthermore, always has a past and a future, for the simple reason that by dint of its consciousness, by dint of the tension of its organic activity, it is always identifying itself with some single partial phase of its life instead of with the whole ; but nevertheless the whole is always active, and both past and future accordingly are real in the present. Experi- TIME. 151 mentalists have limited the present of con- sciousness to a few seconds, because they have limited the self to some very simple separate activity. The statement, made above, that the absolute now is the present of a perfectly organized activ- ity leads directly to the paradoxes about an empty time and a filled time. An organized activity, wherein means and end are become so perfectly adjusted as to have realized their identity, the end seeming no longer external to the means but fulfilment of them, may be viewed in two ways, — either from the standpoint of one of the many minor component activities, or from the standpoint of the single whole as an undi- vided and henceforth indivisible activity; and, if from the former, it will be in a filled time, while from the latter it will be in an empty time. Thus, again, time is filled, and then timeless, when everything to be done is being done ; and empty, and then not time, when there is nothing further to be done. The state of the skilful work- man, unhesitatingly pursuing some goal, doing now this thing, now that, but knowing intuitively the relation of every act to every other, illus- trates the first case; and the state of rest, of sound sleep, fairly illustrates the second. Free activity, in fine, both as an acquisition and as 152 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. an instinct, quite transcends the distinctions of time-duration. The returned wanderer, so often appealed to for illustration of the nature of the time-con- sciousness, looks at his old home, not seen for years, and exclaims, " But yesterday I was a careless boy among these hills ; " and then, after reflecting a little, recalling what has inter- vened, " What long, long years have passed away since I left this quiet, simple home ! " The time is as nothing, until the events crowd in one after another, and then it lengthens into years, its length being a sort of measure of the contrast between the old state and the new. But, finally, reflection reaches a third stage, and we hear the wanderer exclaim : " And yet, though different, I am, after all, the same. Throughout, my life has been but one life. The boy I was then I am now. Time only fulfils, it does not change. Past and future are but one abiding present." For the wanderer, as for our science, an empty time and a filled time are timeless, and past and future are always in the present. Time as filled is a time in which all the con- tained events are so fully organized or related as to be the immediate incidents of a single life or a single activity; and, now to touch TIME. 153 briefly upon the fourth paradox, the study of history or of any process or evolution is fairly describable as a time-filling pursuit, the many discovered events being made only the related parts of one event. Until the filling is accom- plished, until the many are seen as one, the history or process is a broken series, with past, present, and future more or less isolated from each other; but so soon as the filling or the unification is complete, so soon, in short, as the series is explained, there seems to be no his- tory. Of course, were the studied series ever literally broken and composite, being without any relating unity, there could be no student of it, no historian; and, as for our own day, historians and evolutionists appear to be hav- ing the very rich concluding experience of the returned wanderer, for whom past and future disappeared in an all-containing present. Furthermore, to approach the fact before us from a somewhat different point of view, as a history completes itself, reaching its final ex- planation, the sequence of its events is found to have complete expression in the different coexisting phenomena of the present. The stages, so long referred to the past, as they are seen more deeply, — that is, with reference to what is real or essential in them, — prove to be 154 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. but actual phases of the present, the life seen in history to be but the fuller life of the present. Biology, as if finding a material expression of this truth, has had a doctrine of recapitulation, wherein a present form is seen to pass through many, if not all, of the stages of its evolution. Still this special doctrine only partially or dis- tantly illustrates the principle here in question, for biological recapitulation is neither complete nor literal. Perfect illustration could be only where the recapitulated stages were absolutely coexistent, since, if itself seen in time, the recapitulation cannot possibly appear literal. Only as we view an organism for what it now is, not for the different things it has been, can we find it literally a fulfilment of the past. In the prevalent conviction that what first was is now and is the very essence, the organiz- ing principle, of the present, we have a hint of what time must be. One's remotest past is only one's deepest nature now, and the many monu- ments of one's past, fully interpreted, properly related, are the manifold aspects of one's pres- ent. " The history of all things, that am I," the thinker has sooner or later to say; "its stages mediate my life to-day." Mathematics, in its doctrine of motion, in its formulae descriptive of motion, really identifies TIME. 155 sequences and coexistences. It gets at the identification, to be sure, through reducing time, which is pure sequence, and space, which is pure coexistence, to infinites or infinitesimals, in which motion is also rest; but these useful conceptions of mathematics are only hypotheti- cal quantities, or quantitative abstractions, for relationship or organic character, and within the organic change is also permanence, or sequence is coexistence. The mathematician's infinity, then, is at bottom a case of organic recapitula- tion ; and parenthetically, to connect the present with the past of this book, recapitulation means both original life, or original adjustment, and immortality. The self that is, both was and will be. So, now to repeat, with a view to the evidence of the four paradoxes and of what has been said in the discussion of them, time is essentially dynamic, being not a form of life or of con- sciousness, but a vital, organic incident of it. Time is something used in organic life, not something in which organisms live. It is the relational in so far as this involves unrest, change, difference. And, in conclusion, that time is inseparable from space has been indi- cated in the identity of the present and the coexistent. Space is the coexistent, or the re- 156 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. lational as abiding and homogeneous. The sequent and the coexistent, however, the chang- ing and the abiding, are one, even as sub- ject and object, or part and whole, are one. Or, again, the unity of space and time is shown in the fact that each is in itself an abstraction for something in the other. Thus, space were not space without motion, and time were not time without rest; and time is an abstraction for motion, space for rest. The mathematician, already appealed to, goes a long way toward showing what space and time both are, when he gets his concept of force, or at least of mechanical movement, from their identity. As space is the present of time, so time is the else- where of space; and both, simply because of this interdependence, are in themselves rela- tional, dynamic, inseparable from the things in them, intrinsic to the changing permanence, or moving rest of the organic. 1 1 It would be interesting to apply the doctrine of time here presented to the problems of memory and retention. Plainly memory cannot be of the past for itself alone, of the past as literally past, for memory cannot possibly be an isolated faculty of mind ; and retention cannot be explained by any storehouse theory of mind, or by any* hypothesis of scars on the brain, or of habits of repetition, or of an all-powerful un- consciousness back of consciousness. What memory and re- tention are, however, cannot be discussed here at any length. Only it is plain that their nature is very definitely implied in TIME. 157 that of change and time. That which changes also always is ; and memory, accordingly, coming in the wake of change, must be as much of the present as of the past, or let us say that it must be of the past made contemporary. The fact already casually referred to, of memory's dependence on present con- ditions, is all that the psychologist needs for the basis of a theory, if he will only remember that those present conditions are only relational parts of a whole. And, as to retention, in that changing thing which also abides both the forgotten past can be recalled and the unseen future can be revealed. Both the recall and the revelation will be as natural as the change itself. What the change needs will come of itself. CHAPTER XIII. a summary: dynamic vs. formal idealism. PERHAPS a summary in this place is un- necessary, but aside from its possible value to somebody there are certain points in the foregoing that may well be emphasized by repetition, and others that having been given no direct recognition can now be made explicit. The simple statement that ideas are not forms but forces is a statement that in itself summarizes all that has been said ; but involved in it are many other not-bnts} which I would bring together here, passing some with mention only, and in regard to others even adding a greater or less amount to the expositions already given. The many different phases, psy- chological, physiological, sociological, and even theological, of the opposition between 1 For this coined word I offer my apologies. No doubt others will fail to find its use justified by the fact that I have imagined it very apt, but I let it stand. It seems apt to me, not only as a name of a form of sentence, but also as a sign of an attitude of mind valuable to the development of thought. It faces the fact of the dependence of thought on negation. DYNAMIC vs. FORMAL IDEALISM. 1 59 Formal Idealism and Dynamic Idealism cer- tainly ought to be seen clearly and so far as possible all at once. So, to begin : — {a) Matter and mind are not two but one, mind being the relationship or the relating activity in matter. Indeed, as was said re- cently of space and time, each of the two is only an abstraction for something essential in the other. Matter as organic is intelligent, and mind as dynamic is material or substantial. Under Dualism or Formalism, which is dual- ist ic, matter cannot be essentially organic nor mind naturally active or executive. (b) Soul, the spiritual as distinct both from the physical and from the rational self, is neither the negation of body nor the negation of mind, but the fulfilling organic activity, or the substance, in which an organic matter and a dynamic mind are one. Matter, then, has soul, because not formally but actually rela- tional ; and mind has soul, because not arbitra- rily but responsibly or naturally executive. (c) Immortality is not a life yonder in an hereafter, but the life here and now. Individ- uality survives decomposition because it is not involved in a unity of the merely composite, but in relationship, which is substantial. (d) Adjustment, which may fairly be taken 160 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. as a biological term for the life hereafter, is not acquired but original, environment being natural, not alien, and the self or organism related, not isolated. The inheritance, too, involved in adjustment, is not literal but rela- tional; and the habit, not mere repetition but organic expression. Of course, as the terms are commonly used, inheritance expresses the parent's adjustment in the offspring, and habit in the parent's own life; but the difference is essential only if one finds individuality in mere physical or bodily limitations. For the or- ganic whole to whose life parent and offspring alike owe their individuality, inheritance and habit are one. (e) The self is not a localized entity, in but not of the body, but a functional activity. Whether we think of the self as soul or as mind, its localization in the brain or in any other part is unthinkable. The character alone of the so-called sensuous consciousness, which can no longer be confined to special organs, is hostile to localization. Dualism, however, re- quires localization. Dualism leads to a mo- narchical despotism in the relation of the parts of the body, as well as in the relation of the parts of society. This social analogy, too, may be carried even farther, since in the still dual- DYNAMIC vs. FORMAL IDEALISM. l6l istic hypothesis of separate sense-organs or of " idea-centres " or little brains existing in different parts of the body, a psychological feu- dalism is presented. Idealism and Materialism have had their different ways of expressing feudalism, but both have expressed it. While one has thought of the brain and the subor- dinate ganglia as mere temporal thrones from which both an intellectual and a spiritual authority were exercised, the other has thought of them as generating a peculiar force, or in interpreting the " reactions " of the body has treated them as arbitrary, or has, in other words, regarded the reactive effects as external results of the causes. "Peculiar force," however, and " temporally enthroned authority " mean the same thing. (/) The mental faculties are not many but one. Not to touch upon other divisions of the mind, it is still the fashion to separate thought and sensation, the former being mind as self-conscious or the consciousness of ideas, and the latter being mind as conscious of the not-self, being so to speak a mere conscious- ness of matter. But the Law of Relativity, without other help, destroys this dualism at a stroke. {g) Ideas are not innate, but actually, vitally ii 1 62 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. mediative. Formal ideas, the ideas of a sepa- rate, immaterial mind, could not but be innate ; given to experience instead of belonging to it. Also, as indicated now so many times, innate ideas, or formal ideas, are naturally expressed in a lifeless medium, a dead language; and under the dualistic position both thought and sensation are of given or eternally fixed ideas expressed in a non-mediative because alien medium. Matter, of course, is the alien medium of sensation. John Locke's sensations as "simple ideas," although set up against Descartes' innate ideas, in being given, fixed, and evident-of-an-wholly-external-something were as innate as ideas ever could be. Even abstract materialism is nativistic, for in its notions of space and time and force and matter it subjects the changes of natural life to certain external forms. Relationism, however, knows no ideas which are not vitally mediative, or the medium of whose expression is not itself alive. For Relationism ideas are not enslaving forms, but liberating plans; their truth being of the kind that really sets you free. (k) Consciousness is never epiphenomenal, but, even like the ideas belonging to it, always mediative; never merely ornamental, but always useful. This not-but is only a repetition of the DYNAMIC vs. FORMAL IDEALISM. 163 one preceding it, but by its particular form it leads to several considerations of importance. That under Dualism consciousness must be epi- phenomenal is now an old story; but certain comparative psychologists, as if holding too literally to the old definition of man as a rational being, have saved to man a mediative consciousness, but condemned the animals, which are said to be wholly creatures of sense, to an epiphenomenal consciousness. They have, then, made man's reason mediative by making man himself an epiphenomenon in the world. But in this procedure they are han- dling a boomerang. Only men, they contend, know relations, while animals know only things ; but, in point of fact, things are relations, and there is no such knowledge of relations as they would have. Relations are actual, not formal. (i) Self-consciousness is not of any subjec- tive entity, of any separate self-hood, but of the living medium of the self's expression. In other words, that which actually mediates, which at the time is mediating one's expression, gives the only self-consciousness possible, the ultimate self being no mere object of consciousness at all, but the realizing mediated act. Two special theories in technical psychology, the Innerva- tion Theory and the Afferent Theory, have both 1 64 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. of them, although from opposite standpoints, made self-consciousness a consciousness of some- thing other than the medium. Thus the former has thought of the self as consciously felt before, and the latter as consciously felt after, activity. 1 Such an epiphenomenal self-consciousness, how- ever, is not to be thought of here. Self-con- sciousness is neither before nor after, but in activity. (J) The individual is not physically a mere medium of natural force, and spiritually the seat of an wholly arbitrary will, but is in himself at once a defined force and a responsible will ; in sociological terms, not a soldier, whether to command or to obey, but a mechanic, skilful by nature, the world about him being always as a tool already in his adapted hands, or say as Spinoza's hammer, never to be made, because original, but ever to be improved in use. And society is an organism of individuals, not a com- munity of souls, nor yet a mere mechanism of bodies. Relationism, in short, — that is to say, Dynamic Idealism, — does away with the military or wholly utilitarian interest of an individual in his fellows, or of a particular people in its neigh- bors, or of the civilized races in the uncivilized, or of man in the kingdom of animals, or even of 1 See also pp. 210 ff. DYNAMIC vs. FORMAL IDEALISM. 1 65 any living creature in its material environment ; and this, simply because it finds the mediation of life always to be through no dead external mechanism, but always through a living media- tor, an organically inclusive life, which to the physical and biological sciences is known as nature, to political philosophy as the state, and to theology as God. And here this summary, although only par- tial, must come to an end. Yet be it hoped that enough has been said to show still more clearly than before at once the deeper tenden- cies of modern thought and the important results of these to modern life. Not-bnts, more- over, will arise in number and in strength, through the chapters that follow this ; and as they come they will only keep us in mind of the simple fact that for the thinker as well as for the laborer the past, which is formal, is but the tool of the present, which is dynamic, in the realization of the ever-pressing future. CHAPTER XIV. CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. THE completed chapters of this second part have all of them served to define the view, with which we started, that consciousness was the essential tension of a system of actual relations. Thus, consciousness was said to be the tension of the adjustment, that is, the in- teraction of the relational parts of an organic whole ; and notably in the chapters on ideas as forces, on the relation of mind to body and soul, and on time, this view found strong cor- roboration. But technical psychology has had several terms for the dynamic phase of con- sciousness, and about these terms numerous special theories, to which some attention is due, have grouped themselves. The terms in question, or the most important of them, are feeling (or emotion), attention, and interest ; and in psychological theory, as well as in every-day usage, these three terms have often been very strangely distinguished. Interest, for example, by some writers has been completely divorced CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. 1 67 from both feeling and attention, although such a divorce upon examination will be found to be impossible. In the first place, interest and feeling have been divorced by the exaltation of the latter into a faculty quite by itself. Feeling as such has been given a worth wholly its own. It has been regarded as a purely subjective state, which is both naturally had independently of any experience of an outer world and prop- erly cultivated for its own peculiar sake, while interest has been objective, mind being im- agined capable of interesting itself in things for which it has no feeling. Interest, then, has been a consciousness of things wholly ex- ternal; and feeling, an interest in an wholly unrelated self. That the courting of mere feeling in social life and even in education is very common indeed, any one who is willing to look can see clearly ; but equally evident is the fact that mere " subjective " feeling, feeling with a worth all its own, is, after all, not subjective, being objective or external even to the point of determinism. Schleiermacher, bent on re- ducing religion to mere feeling, was quite right in concluding that religion was a condition of absolute dependence ; and popular usage also 1 68 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. has been right in applying the term not only to a purely subjective condition, but also to an altogether objective sensation. There is also a deal of light to be had upon the nature of feeling in the circumstance that, as the term has been used, feeling is exclusively of either the soul or the body. The mind, wholly de- void of feeling, only knows. But the soul's feeling and the body's feeling, in spite of the supposed opposition between these parts of the self, are at least in practice one and the same, whatever they may be in theory. Hegel criti- cised Schleiermacher by saying that he made beasts as religious as men ; and in human his- tory this criticism has certainly been justified, for the cultivation of emotions, moral or re- ligious, merely for the emotions' sake, has always been attended by extreme sensuality, the emotion proving to be only a sort of spirit- ual abstraction for bodily sensation. So it appears both from the virtual objectivity of merely subjective feeling and from the double use of the term " feeling " that the two, feeling and interest, are essentially one. As of other opposites that have come up for our attention, each is but an abstraction for something in the other. In practical affairs the divorce of subjective CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. 1 69 feeling and objective interest shows itself in the assumption that you can interest a man in his work solely by paying him for it, a Christian in his duty solely by the promise of happiness in an abstract hereafter, a scholar in his studies by honors or prizes or athletic contests, or, the money and the promises and the prizes failing, by their complementary methods, — tortures, threats, fines, disgraces. Rewards or punish- ments cast over an uninteresting thing the cloud of sentiment, so that, with plenty of means to reward or punish, plenty of assurance to promise or threaten, one has little if any need of interesting. With an honor-roll one can be a " successful " teacher ; with a well- filled purse, a power in society ; and with mere avowals of allegiance to creeds and social con- ventions generally, a model for one's fellows. But, unfortunately for the assumption on which such successes as these are founded, the special charm in any case very soon ceases to work, or is found to work in a way not for a moment intended. Whoever labors for money only is bound in time to cheat his employer. The Christian who knows only the Future is really unfaithful to the present. The student whose goal you make honor or display blames you in time for his failure. The model for his 170 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. fellows has a fall. Simply, then, in the Bible's way of putting it, " You cannot serve God and mammon ; " feeling and interest assert their identity, or dependence, even when they seem to have been most thoroughly divorced. The speculator in psychology has had two ways, apparently opposite, of separating interest from feeling. Either he has held that feeling comes temporally before objective interest, — that is, before experience or expression, — or he has, strangely enough, reversed the temporal order of the two. In regard, then, to the former of these positions, the meaning is, to take a con- crete case, that the emotion of wit precedes the witty saying, or again that sadness as an emotion comes before sadness as a condition, a man being sad before his trouble in any way shows itself, or that the feeling of doing right is ante- cedent to right doing, or finally, to revert to an illustration used above, that a workman has a natural right to the desired money before he has really earned it. Wit, however, on this plan always falls flat; the sadness is only a courted, albeit a morbidly courted, pleasure; the right doing never comes ; and the workman turns beggar. Hence, naturally, the other theory, which is only a reaction, and which like any reaction fails to escape the spell of what it CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. IJl opposes. Thus, to adopt another's character- ization of this second theory, a man, instead of weeping after he has found himself sad, is sad after finding himself weeping. If, then, the original theory disposes of the need of expres- sion, the reaction, although seeming to make expression necessary, gives it no meaning or purpose of its own. A student, for example, may find that what knowledge he has is of worth, but he will never seek knowledge ; and the workman, after plodding aimlessly at his job, may sometimes discover that the work is lucrative, but he will never work for a return. And Andromache's attending maidens, who wept so freely at the departure of the noble Hector, must have found that they, too, had sorrows only after their tears had begun to flow. As Homer himself put it, " And the beautiful Andromache wept bitterly at the going of her noble lord Hector, and the maidens attend- ing her wept too, but each one for her own sorrows." Or can we dare to suppose that the weeping maidens were sad with Andromache? Can we even imagine that knowledge is not more in knowledge itself than in the getting of it? Cer- tainly, as between the two theories, with their contradictory ways of saying essentially the 172 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. same thing, some such conclusion is not unnat- ural. Thus, it makes no real difference whether you tell a man that the return for his labor is originally or naturally his anyway, or that the labor for which he is paid is only some physical, wholly mechanical process, with which emotion- ally he has nothing to do ; and, again, it makes no real difference whether you say in general that mankind has no natural need of doing any- thing, pleasant or unpleasant, or that what man- kind does engage in is not of its doing at all ; and, in view of such an indifference, the con- clusion is that the separated things must after all in some way be identical and inseparable, or more specifically that the emotion that can be either before or after expression indifferently must in reality belong to expression. Just as subject and object are one, so are feeling and interest one. Motive and stimulus have sometimes been separated in the same way, but stimulation is obviously impossible if it does not answer to, or find sympathy in, subjective motive. Outer stimulus is necessarily also inner motive. Motive is not less objective than sub- jective. Strange is it, indeed, that men should ever imagine that what starts activity can be distinct from what afterwards controls it, or that feeling and interest should be two, not one. CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. 173 But, furthermore, in regard to attention the same psychology that has put emotion before condition has also put attention before its object, and the same psychology that has put emotion after condition has also put attention after its object. Attention, however, if before, is arbi- trary; and, if after, compulsory. But the ab- surdity here is even more striking than above. Forsooth, did anybody ever attend to anything before being conscious of it? Or did anybody ever withhold attention until consciousness had defined itself? Education, of course, has put the absurdity of an arbitrary or compulsory atten- tion in practice, just as it has practised that of the antecedent or subsequent emotion, but the results have been far from justifying the method. The habit in education of requiring transitions from one subject to another without any living indication of a connection between them, the habit, in short, of having a loosely composite, instead of an organic curriculum, 1 has not pro- duced thinkers, because it has not succeeded in turning attention in the necessary way ; it has, in general, produced only conventionalists, or, as they were styled before, " intellectual sui- cides." Both the theory and the practice of atten- 1 Of course a prescribed curriculum must always be " loosely composite," for a large majority, if not for all. 174 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. tion, however, may be left here, since it is really altogether evident that, just as feeling must be in and of expression, so attention can be only to what already occupies attention; and with more profit we shall for a moment concern ourselves with certain implied doctrines of association. An arbitrary or compulsory attention, an attention that is independent of interest, involves a natural separation or division in the sphere of objects or interests. No object, in other words, can be supposed to have in itself the reason for a transition of attention to some other. The association of objects, then, can take place only through some wholly external bond. By all the rights of logic, arbitrary or separate atten- tion, unrelated objects of attention, and external association belong together. Then to the doc- trines of attention here in question belong those of association by similarity and by contiguity, since both similarity and contiguity are external to the associated things. The common charac- ter, on which similarity depends, is wholly ab- stract or external to the individual objects united by it, and contiguity is a matter only of the formal space in which objects are found, not of the objects themselves. But common characters, that is to say, formal CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. 1 75 ideas, and a formal space we have found to have no place in more recent theory. Ideas are dy- namic, things being relational; and space is force. But some one declares, " A round coin certainly reminds me of the moon." Well, perhaps it does, but not solely because coin and moon are round. If roundness alone as a common quality made the association, then surely upon the coin being presented all the round things ever seen ought to flock without order or relation to the field of consciousness; but it is needless to say that they do not. Or, once more, some one says that, having on a cer- tain day seen a particular man in the post-office, he thinks of the man a week later, when enter- ing the office; and perhaps he does, but not from mere contiguity. What selects the man from other objects? Surely not similarity nor yet contiguity, but a mechanical relationship, whereby certain things have been, and so still are, the related incidents of the self's activity, is the only possible mainspring of association. Association, then, is by a mechanical or medi- ating, by an intrinsic or substantial, relationship in the things of experience. And apart from association for psychology, what but this is true of association in nature? Chemistry and physics and biology can hardly believe in association 176 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. by formal contiguity or by abstract similarity, unless indeed they insist on still holding to a real material atomism and to a dualism between living organism and physical environment. 1 So, in review, feeling is not independent of interest, but is one with it; attention is neither arbitrary nor compulsory, but natural or respon- sible, being always of the already present object of attention; and association is not imposed, but original or intrinsic. Interest, therefore, at once subjective and objective, at once inwardly motivating and outwardly stimulating, is only the impulse to self-expression that has been seen to belong to the very nature of conscious- ness. In point of fact, it is the expression itself. As said before, it names the dynamic character of ideas or of consciousness generally. One of the keener thinkers of the present day has said 1 Professor James (Psychology, vol. i. p. 549) has gone only half of the way to the view of association here briefly outlined. Thus, he has denied any such thing as the association of ideas, declaring that association is of things ; and in this declaration he is plainly only a reactionist, as also for the most part in his much discussed theory of emotion. True, association is not of ideas, because consciousness is a "stream" or only one running idea ; but true also, things are relational, and accord- ingly one, not many. Only if things were many, however, could we properly speak of the association of things. Professor James, however, has since modified the views of his Psychology considerably. See article in the Psychological Review, 1895, vol. ii. no. 2, " The Knowing of Things Together." CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. 1 77 the following of interest : 2 " Interest (1) is active, projective. We take interest. Interest is de- mand, insistence. Whenever we have an inter- est in any thought we cherish it, cling to it, endeavor in all ways to realize or fulfil it. In- terest (2) implies an object, — the end or thought which claims attention. We are inter- ested in something, while mere feeling [if possible at all] begins and ends in itself. In common speech an ' interest ' means an end which dominates activity. Interest (3) implies the relation which the interesting end bears to the controlling lines of activity, to character. It expresses the identification of the object with the subject." Yes, interest is character; and with Professor Dewey's clear and concise state- ment this chapter may very properly conclude, since in interest as character, in interest as the "identification of the object with the subject," an identification which we know to be original, the object as a living mediator, or as language, is once more set before us. 1 The Study of Ethics, by John Dewey, p. 55. Register Publishing Co., Ann Arbor, Mich., 1894. CHAPTER XV. THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. IF interest names the dynamic nature of con- sciousness from the standpoint of the sub- ject, language is, to say the least, one of the terms that name the same thing from the stand- point of the object. Interest, as a state of consciousness, is always a consciousness of lan- guage, while as an object it is itself language ; or language in its turn may be said to be the identification of the object with the subject. Our Relationism or Dynamic Idealism has had no choice but to find the object of consciousness naturally, essentially linguistic. But, further- more, for interest, which is obviously as much an activity as a consciousness, there is another term that may now be used. Interest, from the standpoint of ethics describable as character, is nothing more nor less than thought, from the standpoint of psychology. Thought, which is new to us here only in name, is the activity that language mediates; or, with equal ac- THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 1 79 curacy, it is the activity that fulfils language as language. 1 Now, of course, throughout these pages the term " language " has been given a very broad meaning. The breadth, however, has been for the sake of depth. Thus, the essential principle of language has been found in the very nature of objectivity. As object, or environment, or social institution, or tool in use, language has been found to be peculiar only to organic life as such, not to the life of human beings. En- vironment is perhaps the best of all the syno- nyms, although both science and popular usage have co-operated in making even this too narrow in its meaning. The two words, however, " lan- guage " and " environment," as really naming the same thing, will be corrective of each other. Besides, the more reflective biology of our time is ready to say that environment is essentially linguistic; and, as we know, the more reflective psychology, that the use of language is as gen- eral and as far-reaching as relation to environ- ment. But when did language begin ? With the beginning of organic life? Yes and no; since language, like anything else, so soon as 1 The alternative definition is given here simply to keep before the mind the important fact that thought and language are one, each as taken alone being only an abstraction for something in the other. 180 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. it is understood in its principle, is quite beyond the shallow question of origin. Organic life can know no formal, merely including time, and so also no beginning in time. And here, too, is another shallow question: Is thought possible without language? Without mere words of the ordinary sort, yes ; but certainly not without language, not without environ- ment. Merely to live is to use language, and life is thought. Any organic form both thinks and is addicted to language, whenever it acts. The view of sensation that we were led to take — a view which made sensation general, or not confined to special organs — was in itself enough, when we had analyzed it, to extend language to include the entire realm of the objective ; but other evidences are available and may now be cited. Thus, to the formal gram- mar of earlier times we have added in our day, as belonging to the science of language, the following branches : philology, phonetics, pho- nology, orthography, and even others in kind; and these special sciences, by explaining lan- guage historically or geographically or physi- ologically or psychologically, at once bring it to a level with other things similarly explained, and so make it not a specific thing, peculiar to a cer- THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. l8l tain form of life and to a certain part of that form, but an altogether general thing. Also, if we accept the view that any medium of expression is linguistic, such changes in education as the mere introduction into courses of study of the physical and biological branches and as the employment of the laboratory method and the establishment of technical schools, and such changes in more directly practical affairs as that in religion from church and book to home and man, and that in civic life from no diversion for the people beyond verbal direction of all kinds to diversion through open museums and public parks, show that language is getting to be, not only in theory but also in practice, a very general affair. In a sense, that is certainly not the inalienable right of poetry, the great park systems of our modern cities are a means of bringing men and natural creatures all into communion with each other. Trees and fields and rocks and hills and lakes are a language that man and animal alike can heed, and heed- ing reply to with mutual understanding. But now, not to dwell longer upon the larger language of our own times, since as a matter of course anything, from the standpoint of its principle, must be more inclusive than the or- dinarily recognized expression of it, we have 1 82 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. left to consider, more directly than heretofore, or at least from a side not yet approached, the nature and the function of language. Subject and object, or thought and language, we have found to be two contemporary incidents in the life of the organic, and they represent not two things but a relation, which is essential to the very integrity of an organic nature. The sub- ject, an organism itself, is also a relation within an organic whole, and the tension of this re- lation makes the consciousness of the object. But a subject's consciousness, arising in this way or having this general character, has the effect of giving to the subject, not exactly two activities, but two phases of one activity. Thus, it makes the subject at once in a state of overt expression and in a state of restraint, at once active to what is without and active to self, at once more or less impulsively active and more or less under control. So real, so positive is this division or differentiation in the activity of an organism, that one sees in it, after all, only the organic character itself. Not only is the relationship, upon which organism depends, inseparable from a fulfilling activity, but also essential to this activity is the negative factor of control ; and if heretofore we have explained the object as due to dynamic relationship, THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 183 we can now say with the same meaning that it is due to subjective control. The much used Law of Relativity is not less a law of control in organic life than a law of objectivity. In fact, an object in just so far as it is object- ive is the symbol of a controlled act, its unity or organic wholeness reflecting the relations implied in the act itself. Thus, to approach the factor of control from a slightly different standpoint, activity, whether as abstractly pos- sible or thinkable or as positively known in the world, is at once differentiating and organizing. Wholly general acts and wholly specific acts are impossible. Impossible also are wholly unconscious acts, since consciousness is the tension of the general and the specific. Ac- cordingly expression at any time, although never isolated, in the first place is always with reference to some meaning, and in the second place always induces a more particular mean- ing. Thus, paradoxically, every act both has a purpose or a determined relation before ex- pression, and upon expression finds what its purpose or relation is. Action, in short, al- though not without meaning, always induces interpretation of itself; it always realizes an existing relationship. But the interpretation in its turn always induces control, and con- 1 84 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. trol brings activity to self and consciousness of a not-self. 1 Of course the mere fact of activity to self in the life of an organism is very easily identified, if one is not already quite familiar with it. Large-written examples of it are in the difference between men and animals, men being human and having man's " natural " environment, in so far as they live the animal life to themselves ; and in the general dependence of rational observation on control. The day laborer who would deal the second blow more accurately than the first, pauses that the involved relations may define themselves, but the first had given him the interest in accuracy for the second. Reading, too, is not psychologically different from the laborer's reflection. The presented page, we usually say, in its symbols awakens a very highly complex imagery, in the form of reminiscences of all sorts and suggestions and fancies, but it all stands for a life that the reader has come to live to himself. It is his past, which as he reads re- turns, but in the form of an object, in which the unity of the present is symbolized, and through which a more accurate blow at life is in prepara- tion. The reader is measuring the relations of 1 This relation between objectivity and subjective control I have also discussed at some length in the article on " The Stages of Knowledge," already referred to on p. 119. THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 1 85 things in his world with reference to the organic tendencies in himself, and can be a reader only as he controls the tendencies. A lion, further- more, who growls instead of rushing at once into the conflict, is turned scientist for a period, or, suppose we say, has found the pen mightier than the sword; and wherever even in animal life hesitation or withdrawal from immediate action manifests itself, there without question is an activity to self which involves also a clearing consciousness of the sphere of activity, so to speak, a definition of the medium. And in technical theory, where large facts are always small-written, the same activity to self is recog- nized. Thus, the sensation as a relation is in itself symbolic of some controlled action in an- other part of the organism. Sound to the ear answers to the control of the voice, and distance to the eye answers to a restrained movement of head or hand or even of the whole body. Illus- trations, then, are not wanting of the general principle that subjective control is an incident of the consciousness of an object, or that the move- ment to organization in the object, the outer world, is in sympathy with that in the self or subject, if not even identical with it. Activity to self, furthermore, as the phrase itself ought to indicate, is not a mere negation. 1 86 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. It is more than cessation of self-expression. It is itself a very definite activity, or let us say a very real part of the functional life of an organism. It is so real and so definite that it has fulfilled itself in organs specially developed with it. The very division, noted above, of an organism's activity into an activity to what is without and an activity to what is within, is one and the same with the differentiation of organs of thought from organs of mere conduct, or, roughly speaking, of brain-functions from body-functions. Moreover, to venture a step farther in this physiological interpretation, not only are the organs of thought very plainly in a living interactive connection with those of conduct, and also in their separation parallel to the general opposition of subject and object, or thought and language, or social and natural environment, but also within their own sphere a corresponding or in truth a practically iden- tical dualism is necessary. In other words, their control is both of organs that are " right- handed," or directly governed, and of organs that are "left-handed," acting only mechani- cally although in symmetry or sympathy with those under the direct government. In order to indicate this correspondence still more defi- nitely, it might be said that just as environ- THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 1 87 ment, or in general the outer object, may fairly be called an organism's left hand, so quite within the organism the whole system of negatively or indirectly controlled organs is objective or physically environing to the com- plementary system that acts right-handedly; and, in a single word or two, the correspond- ence means that right-handedness and symbolic expression are inseparable functions. 1 But if activity to self be as real and as posi- tive as its expression in specially developed organs would imply, just how may it be posi- tively characterized ? Briefly, it is nothing but the subjection of foregoing activity to a sort of self-centred repetition or rehearsal, in order that before overt expression recurs the condi- tions and induced interpretation of the activity may be fully defined. Recurrence is always necessarily the underlying motive, but the pre- 1 Professor Baldwin's theory of right-handedness (Mental Development of the Child and the Race, pp. 58 ff., Macmillan, 1895) is certainly not opposed to the suggestion here made. He finds a " fundamental connection between the rise of speech and the rise of right-handedness " (p. 67), and we have found an equally fundamental connection between the language func- tion in general (i. e. consciousness of a mediating environment, self-consciousness) and the direct or " right-handed " control of one-half of the body. In my little book, "Citizenship and Salvation," I have even discovered a right-handedness in the relation of Socrates to the Greeks and of Christ to the Jews and Romans. Op. cit. pp. 27-28, and 68-70. 1 88 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. viously induced experience enforces a sense of responsibility and a consequent control. Eyes and ears and tongue and hand, all of them intimately involved in the special thought- system and all of them marvellously mobile, are organs, in which originally overt acts are relationally or organically reproduced ; and the reproduction, being always in tension with overt expression, gives rise to a symbolic conscious- ness, which has the form of an after-image. This after-image, however, has all the essential marks of a name, 1 and the controlled use of it, the use of it with reference to its origin, is nothing more nor less than the expression of self in language ; nor are we obliged here to un- derstand the term " language" in a sense a whit narrower than that before enjoined, although the narrower sense is here fully interpreted. Language, finally, as the after-image that rises in consciousness because of the tension between control or rehearsal and overt expres- sion, obviously has a triple function, the three 1 I hardly need to say that both the terms here, " name " and " after-image," are used with regard to underlying principles, not to mere ordinary applications. The after-image, for example, that belongs to abnormal conditions or that introspection and experiment discover, is one thing ; the natural after-image is quite another. And a name is any symbolic representation of external relations. THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 1 89 parts of which correspond to the three rela- tions that an individual, in tension with the life of an organic whole, inevitably assumes. Language is (1) objectively descriptive or representative, relating the self to its natural environment; (2) socially or organically media- tive, relating the self to others in kind; and (3) individually redemptive, relating the self to the unity of all. The inseparableness of these parts, moreover, is the all-important conclu- sion from this chapter; and although our pres- ent purposes will be satisfied without further statement, one cannot help drawing the moral that in human life scientific truth, social inter- course, and prayer to God should be a single interest, and not the three separate interests that they seem to have been so long. Indeed, for such time as they are separate not one of them is what it claims to be. An individual's science, for example, science without inter- course, is formal, and only intercourse can make it dynamic. Prayer, too, without science, is also without faith. The true prayer is the scientific intercourse of many, the science giv- ing it faith and the intercourse giving it life or motive. But after language, action. Simply by reason of the organic connection between the organs 190 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. of activity to self and the organs of overt activity, thought sooner or later dies in a ful- filling conduct; naming is succeeded by doing; the self, only for a time identified with its iso- lating thought-organs, abandons the rehearsing and the after-imagery, returning to its world, — entering the World of Acts, passing from appearance to reality. 1 In social evolution, where the conscious organism is a whole people, the same process of thought that has just been outlined here from the standpoint of a single individual, can be easily detected. Thus, with the rise and growing supremacy of a metropolis, a people is seen to be thinking and u naming " its former life, to be living the former life to itself. The city, so wonderfully mobile, exhibits miles of farm- land and years of experience focused even in a single block. It is the very much contracted life and in its institutions the very much contracted symbol of the country. The old relations persist, but greatly intensified. The great department- store, for example, is the country-store over again, but on a much grander scale ; and the streets have the same function as the country roads, but driver and wayfarer cannot be too alert. Also, no new institutions are created, but the old ones of the village are established on larger plans. 1 Or, in Kant's terms, from "phenomena" to the "thing-in- itself." Kant's phenomenal world, however, was a language or medium, to which he denied any actual mediation, — a dead language. THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 191 Yes, the city repeats or rehearses the country life, and intensifies it, turning simplicity into complexity, naivete into self- consciousness and sophistication. But, more than this, the rise of cities with their congested population always shows the country life suffering de- cline, the people living it henceforth to themselves. Do but consider, in evidence, how the rural civiliza- tion decays. The country people lose their culture and change to mere drudges, little better than day laborers. Inactivity sets in among them. Even their agriculture often passes into the hands of large owners, and becomes, so far as the country is con- cerned, a purely mechanical, left-handed process, be- ing indeed very commonly transferred to unsettled territory. The great department-store not only repro- duces the country-store, but takes away its business by carrying on an ever-increasing " out-of-town " trade. And the city goes to the theatre and the ball, while the deserted old people on the farms pine for the days when life was so much more worth while, resenting perhaps the means of communication and transportation that have made the changed conditions possible. In short, then, the country dies as the city lives ; and it dies, just because, as was said, in the city a people comes to live its old life to itself, or to " name " the old life, the positive activity having been put in abeyance. Thus, again, with an absorbing interest rather in control, distribution, communication, and manufacture than in direct production, the city manifests just such a withdrawal from nature, — that is, from the sphere of original expression, — as is implied 192 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. in thinking generally; to repeat, it shows a whole people thinking a former life. Furthermore, contemporaneous with the rise of the city is the division of the people into classes. Names for these classes are not easily found, but the following will serve to mark the essential differ- ences : (i) Thinkers arise, who control; (2) officials, who do the clerical work, so to speak, of getting the after-image on paper ; and (3) laborers, who partly in the country and partly in the city do the physical drudgery. Plato found these classes, though he gave them slightly different names, in the city of Athens, when Greek thinking was at its height. But either Plato's names or ours suggest a sort of analogy to the (1) right-handed and (2) left-handed organs of thought and (3) the merely physical organs of conduct. To the analogy itself, in the terms given, there probably attaches no great importance, but it certainly indicates some fundamental relations in social life. " But, after language, action. . . . Thought sooner or later dies in a fulfilling conduct ; naming is suc- ceeded by doing." The evolution of the classes in society shows this. These classes, though retaining their original relations, change both in their form and in their personnel after some such plan as follows, the several stages or moments being (1) the stage of consciously asserted patriotism, (2) the stage of aesthetic self- appreciation, (3) the stage of the cos- mopolitan spirit, (4) the stage of assumed and cul- tivated naturalism, and (5) the stage of spiritual surrender or resignation. Thus : — THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 193 Five Stages in Social Evolution. ii Thinkers Officials Laborers Historical Illus- tration 1 Law-makers Soldiers Slaves Greece before Peri- cles' time 2 Artists Citizens Paid Servants The Age of Peri- cles 3 Scientists Politicians Artisans The Period just be- fore Socrates 4 Philosophers Fatalists or Time-servers Revolutionists The Socratic Period 5 Religious Leader Followers Hirelings Greece, a Christian- Roman Province Thought in general controls activity in order to unify it. The legislative thinker, however, controls rather through restraint than understanding, and is therefore the first to appear in the moments of a society's self-consciousness, and has soldiers and slaves as his natural contemporaries. After him comes the artist, — that is, the historian or particularly the dramatist, — who defines life positively or explicitly, but still in sen- suous terms. The legislator only forbids expression of impulses, while the artist controls it by revealing a har- mony in the sphere of the expression. So with artists go citizens instead of mere soldiers, and servants instead of slaves, the larger freedom being shared by all in the body politic. Then after art comes science, thought penetrating to a still deeper view. Science is art at its limit, just as art might be styled legislation at its limit. For science art's sensuously expressed ideal becomes only an idea or a natural mechanical law, 13 194 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. the unity or harmony of art being freed from any sen- suous relation to restrained impulses or stimulating ob- jects. Contemporary with scientists, therefore, are the politicians, for whom social life is a carefully measured opportunity instead of a devotion, cosmopolitanism having succeeded patriotism, and artisans, who also serve rather a trade than a master. But close upon science in the evolution of a thinking society follows philosophy, and thereupon society is seen to assert once for all an independence of traditions, institu- tions, and long- cherished ideals. Moreover, the in- dependence that her philosophers teach, her fatalists or time-servers, as if the clerks of philosophy, un- wittingly practise, and her enemies at home and abroad give promise of fulfilling. And the fulfilment comes with religion and some form of imperialism, the spiritual and the material finding themselves once more, after a long separation, identified in a revolution, in a forward movement of history. So, as was said, in social as well as in individual life, conduct follows thought. The spiritual con- sciousness of faith succeeds the self-consciousness of reason. part in. THE WORLD OF ACTS. CHAPTER XVI. REACTION OR INTERACTION? AT the close of the Introduction the three questions that follow were set for an- swer : What are things? What are ideas? And what are acts? These questions, as we very soon came to see, amounted to inquiries into the nature of body and mind and soul respectively ; and to the first two of them an- swers have been given already, while at least by implication much has been said also in reply to the third, notably in the chapter entitled " Body, Mind, Soul." Certainly it has been made clear that the objectivity of things, of ideas, and of acts is not of three distinct sorts, — the physical, the rational, and the spiritual, — but only of one sort, which we may now call the organic. Of the world of acts, however, more remains to be said. Certain implications need to be made explicit. Thus, in the first place, is the individ- ual self's activity a reaction or an interaction ? This question gets its interest from the fact that not only ethics but also psychology and 198 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. even physiological psychology have held, or at least expressed themselves as if they held, that the typical act was a reaction, and this in the face of very serious difficulties. 1 As commonly represented, reaction is a dualistic conception, being in general the peculiar response to an external stimulus, or, in other words, the mani- festation of a causal power, — that is, a power of initiating action, — attributed to some isolated organ or organic individual. Now in one way, now in another, the advocates of reaction de- clare that a certain single representative of the world's phenomena does wholly of itself cause the differences, if not even the existence, of some other representative; that representative a y for example, causes representative b or at least whatever in b distinguishes it from a. This view, however, of action or causation, arising, as it plainly does, from the notion that individuality is a matter of physical determina- tions, is altogether absurd, and is seen to be so as soon as it is clearly and directly stated. In social life the habit of cherishing the human body after death is an indication of the view of individual activity here in question; but, as hinted before, both physiology and psychology also show the same determination 1 Cf. pp. 160-161. REACTION OR INTERACTION? 199 to treat a single physical part as having quite within its physical self the power of initiation, or — and this in the end amounts to the same thing — they regard that upon which the in- dividual acts as only the external occasion, the merest stimulus of the activity. This, however, is sheer creationism, and one wonders, upon rec- ognizing its marks, how it can have held its own so long in scientific circles. Even the physical scientist, in the very face of his hypothesis of conservation, has failed again and again to see that causal relationship among nature's phe- nomena cannot possibly be an affair of the arbi- trary creative reaction of one part upon another, but must be something altogether different from this; being, let us say at once, much more accurately described as an interaction of the parts, or, to use the very terms employed before in the account of mind, a relating activity, in which nature ever realizes or substantiates herself. Cause and effect, too, like end and means, must be contemporaries; they cannot belong to separate intervals of time, as the dualist would have them. But somebody says at this point, as if still unconvinced, that action, or at least the action of a living self, must be free, having not only a power of initiation but also a power of material 200 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. creation. Well, so it must, if by life you mean something external to the agent, something introduced from without. To any one, any agent, living a life not his own, initiation and creation are necessary. Such an agent, how- ever, is not substantially free. The freedom given to him in his power of material creation is wholly taken away in his dependence upon an external life or an external stimulus. His power of initiation is only a conceit. Give him creative power, then, if you must, but rec- ognize that so far as he is concerned what he does or makes is wholly idle, being useless to him in the next minute. Such creation is what in popular language has sometimes been known as "puttering;" and I venture to say that even the subjects of study in many lab- oratories of the present day are so far diverted from their natural life by formalistic scientists as to be made mere " putterers." Puttering is not confined to the every-day life of society, for let us remember that subjects in laboratories are very much like actors on a stage, exhibiting to the public its own foibles. Fortunately the freedom of formal initiation and material creation is not the only freedom. Life can also be free to create itself, to be crea- tive within itself; and with such a freedom it REACTION OR INTERACTION? 201 quite escapes from the need of peculiar responses to external stimuli. Thus, in the first place, since life is in reality universal, since there is no lifeless sphere, no realm of the essentially inor- ganic, sudden coming into being is unnecessary. All parts already share in the vital force ; no part possesses anything peculiar ; so that effects external to or different from their causes, as well as agents aloof from their stimuli, are quite out of place, differences being quite as much an antecedent condition as a subsequent result of activity. Organic differentiation is creative, but quite in and of itself, quite within itself. Actual relationship, in which lies the world's substan- tiality, as well as that of any individual in the world, requires change, but a change only intrin- sic to itself. And, in the second place, freedom under any other principle than that of an iden- tity of inner motive and outer stimulus is, after all is said, as empirically unreal as it is theoreti- cally impossible. Even the dualist shows this, when he makes the agent arbitrary and the outer stimulus external, since external stimulus and arbitrary initiation are one and the same thing. That stimulus and motive are one, we have seen in many places already. Perhaps the uni- versality of language is the most direct and suggestive indication of the identity; but in the 202 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. fact of environment being natural, not alien, or of adjustment being original, not acquired, or of ideas and forces being one and the same, not two and distinct, or of objectivity being incident to the negative factor of control, that is involved in all organic life, motive and stimulus, the inner and the outer, are seen to be inseparable. And, as for current psychology, the doctrine of sensa- tion as not an element of knowledge, as not a peculiar consciousness of a physical disturb- ance, but a relation, is its most direct index to the same inseparableness. Indeed, from the standpoint of psychology, I have myself liked to call the^ identity of stimulus and motive the first law of knowledge, although, or possibly just because, it is a law rather of action than of knowledge. The sensation as a relation, how- ever, objectivity as an incident of organic con- trol, and motive and stimulus as identical are all three but different views of the same truth ; they all show that action, instead of ever being dual- istically reactive, must always be, as among different parts or between any agent and his environment, organically interactive. How can action be anything else but this, when environ- ment in its separation only represents an other- ness that is intrinsic to the unity of the self? Agent and environment, then, are always each REACTION OR INTERACTION? 203 other's natural contemporaries, just as thought and language are contemporary, living the same life, each in its character being evolved with the other, not one from or out of the other. Both evolution and creationism have been disposed to make one of the two outgrow the other, and so have erred seriously. According to evolu- tion, mind has not only grown out of, but it has also outgrown matter, and, according to crea- tionism, matter, although originally produced by mind, has had henceforth no natural dealings with its cause. But, like the left hand, with which we have already compared it, environ- ment really keeps in adjustment to its right- handed agent. In the view of action, furthermore, to which we have been led, there are involved important conclusions about such bones of contention in the scientific world as impulse, instinct, and habit. Briefly, then, what can we say of these? Parallel to the opposition that has been out- lined between arbitrary reaction and organic in- teraction, is that between impulse, instinct, and habit as marking three distinct sorts or classes of activity, and as marking only three inseparable in- cidents of all activity. An agent, whose environ- ment is alien and who is therefore condemned to arbitrary reactions upon external stimulations 204 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. will apparently have three distinct sorts of acts to offer in any of life's emergencies : first, acts that are with reference to the environment but not in adjustment to it, — blindly impulsive acts, in other words; second, acts that are neither with reference to environment nor in adjustment to it, or so-called instinctive acts; and, third, acts that are both with reference to environment and in adjustment to it, or habits. Thus, as the terms are very commonly used in human relations, a man's impulses are only his blind feelings for adjustment, acts that may or may not be successful; his habits are actual adjust- ments ; and his instincts not adjustments at all. All three, however, are forms of arbitrary reac- tion, since the impulses are blind, the instincts are useless, and the habits can be secured only by chance and continued only by literal repeti- tion, so that the agent really gains nothing from the choice that we have conceded him. This, however, suggests that the three sorts of activity must, after all, be one, and that the dualism which, through its notion of an alien environ- ment, manages at least in a fictitious way to separate them, is itself a fiction. But how can impulse, instinct, and habit be one and still retain the distinct meanings that men insist on giving them? Well, it is easy to REACTION OR INTERACTION? 205 see that impulsiveness at least must be charac- teristic of all activity, since acts in so far as par- ticular — that is, as distinguished in any way — must have some already defined relations, and so cannot be in themselves purely impulsive. So I say that impulsiveness belongs rather to activity as such than to any special group of acts. To declare, for example, that somebody has many impulses, to classify impulses, is to lose sight of what impulse is. Impulse, like stimulus, must be one, not many. The outer world is not properly looked upon as a group of stimuli, since the real stimulus is always the relational unity of all the parts ; nor should the subject within be thought to be a bundle of im- pulses or to have in itself a conflict of impulses with habits or with any other supposedly " higher " activities, since all movement towards activity springs only from the dynamic charac- ter of organic unity. And, again, impulse can be neither something to be avoided nor some- thing to be expressed in action, since action itself is impossible without it; and, as for im- pulse being blind, it undoubtedly is so, if the blindness is with reference to something wholly external to the activity. A consciousness, how- ever, of the inner conditions of the activity, a consciousness incident to the interactions of the 206 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. organic members of the agent, accompanies all impulsive action. And habit, as an act of adjustment, is, so to speak, environment urging its fulfilment in the self. It is the impulsiveness of action from the standpoint of environment. We talk of bad habits and of good habits, but so doing we use the term loosely, since habit, like stimulus and like impulse, is fundamentally one. Only the thing that a man is always doing can be called a true habit, and a man is always doing only one thing. The so-called habit, the habit of par- ticular relations, has the company of other activities and so is not habitual. Its form as well as its meaning is constantly changing. There is no such thing as being condemned to a particular line of conduct. " Habits " can be changed, because they do change of themselves, because they are not habitual, because they are particular. Finally, if impulse and habit are the same thing from two sides, what of instinct? Instinct applies to the selfs activity in so far as it realizes a social relation to lower forms of life or an adjustment to what has been called here the " natural " environment. The activity of individual organs is instinctive; of the whole organism, impulsive or habitual ; and of course REACTION OR INTERACTION? 207 the two are not to be separated, being one activity after all. Animals, we are wont to say, are instinctive, not rational; but animals are social only to a part of our life or only to our life in individual organs. Instinct, then, is related to habit, the activity of the organ to that of the organism, very much as means to end; and, in view of this relation, we can say con- clusively that all activity is impulsive and habitual and instinctive. One cannot escape one's instincts, nor can one on the other hand safely lose the self in them ; but still all activ- ity is instinctive. Indeed all three, — impulse, instinct, and habit, — being fundamental in all activity, are alike in this respect, that they are to be neither avoided nor cultivated for their own sakes. They are all to be trusted, but not courted; and controlled, but not abandoned. Now action, as at once impulsive, instinctive, and habitual, as always inducing change even in the interest of preserving unity, is the source of the individual agent's substantiality, while at the same time it relates him to the whole of which he is an organic part. Actuality of relationship, in other words, not physical parti- tion or determination, is the true criterion of real individuality. The agent, who acts in the way here advocated, is not less an individual because 208 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. not exercising a peculiar arbitrary creative power, but is all the more truly an individual for being so immediately responsible to what is — and to himself as a vital incident of what is. Here, however, we are brought to the fact of will, to be considered in another chapter. Of course, apart from a substantial individuality in the agent, will would be even less than the breath used in speaking the word. CHAPTER XVII. WILL. WILL is the demand, essential in organic life, for preservation of the integrity of organic differences. Every organ, then, be- cause different, because individual, having a particular relation to maintain, a peculiar function to express, has a will, and with its will a substantial freedom. True, no indi- vidual has an alien environment to deal with; but it has the otherness, the objectivity, which is fundamental to its own nature, and this otherness makes its will actual and its freedom real. With reference to an alien environment will and freedom could be only formal, — con- ceits, not facts. Will, then, to bring into use here a conclu- sion that was defined quite clearly in the pre- ceding chapter, is not arbitrarily creative but responsibly mediative. It is not something imposed upon activity from without, but is itself a part of activity. It is the positive of that of which we have found control, also an 14 210 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. inner incident of action, to be the negative. It is related to control as the subject is related to the object or the self to the not-self. And here, at least so far as principles go, we might stop. To say more is hardly necessary. Still, now as before, criticism of special theories and illustration from practical affairs may not be altogether idle. Thinkers, as well as chil- dren, should be allowed to play with their developed powers. The doctrine of will is intimately connected with that of the feeling of effort ; and naturally enough, since effort is an evidence of will. Of the feeling of effort, however, there are even to-day two contending theories among psychol- ogists, both of them involving a separation of will and action, — the Innervation Theory and the Afferent Theory, referred to in a former chapter. 1 These theories are parallel to those of emotion and attention that were examined in the chapter on "Interest." Thus, the former of the two says that the feeling of effort is of the output of energy necessary to perform a certain act, or let us say, in interpretation, the agony of the soul in its struggle with an un- willing body. This undoubtedly approaches to the view to which most men to-day unreflec- i P. 164. WILL. 211 tively incline. The Afferent Theory, however, would have the feeling of effort rather a conse- quent of action than an antecedent of it ; and to this view many psychologists of recent times, among them even James, have been very strongly disposed. If the Innervation Theory would have us feel our souls as something entering the organs of action from without, the Afferent Theory, not less violent in its separa- tion of the willing agent from the sphere of his activity, would have us feel the effort of an act, — that is, feel responsible for an act, — in which we really have had no part, making the feeling only attendant upon action, not vitally incident to it. In one case, then, we are not naturally interested in what we do; in the other, we did not do it. Such, then, are the theories that we have to face with all boldness. No doubt a certain plausibility belongs to each of them. In social life and on laboratory tables we do often come across characters that seem the incarnation of one or the other of them. Some people, for example, feel so much effort before they have done anything, — so much, in fact, that they stop at the feeling; and others feel so keenly the effort of what they have done, whether just now or long ago, or even of what others are doing, — 212 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. they feel this so keenly that they, too, turn inactive. But, after all, living on the mere zeal of future activity or on the mere fatigue of past activity or of others' activity is not real effort. Effort is neither antecedent zeal nor subsequent fatigue; it is in and of activity itself. Activity, like everything else which we have had occasion to consider, is not manifold and serial, but single and continuous. Nobody ever does or ever did more than one thing. Upon one deed, and one deed only, each one of us is forever harping. Hence the worth and the hope and the responsibility of life. But, if action is one, not many, the feeling of effort can be apart from it in the sense of neither the Innervation nor the Afferent Theory. Only the already or only the still active self can have it. Suppose a man at work in his shop, using now one tool, now another. His work is neces- sarily single; and this too, although perhaps not so obviously to a casual observer, even if he be a poor workman, say a mere apprentice, who only "putters." Certainly he is not engaged in a series of wholly unrelated acts. His feel- ing of effort, then, belongs to his action. He has it because he is doing something, not because he is going to do, nor because he has WILL. 213 already done something. Only if the work were serial and composite could the sense of effort be said to come before or after the use of any particular tool. The feeling before action does very well for an immaterial spirit, an unworldly soul; and after action, for a physi- cal automaton; but for a self responsibly at work upon something in the world it cannot but be in and of the activity itself. So the appeal to the feeling of effort is no argument for a separate or arbitrary will. On the contrary, it leads to a justification of an intrinsic or responsible will. Another appeal, however, is often made. The moral life is said to need a separate arbitrary will; but, in reality, does it? Listen to the erring youth. "I will do better," he says, "I won't offend again; I won't, I won't, I won't!" And, as we know, the more he says he will not the more he is in danger of falling. But, on the supposition of an arbitrary will, the resolution once made would be conclusive, not perhaps so far as ex- ternal action is concerned, but at least so far as moral character is concerned. After his de- termined "I won't," the youth may err, but quite in spite of himself. He would err, of course, simply for the reason that " I will " and 214 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. "I won't" have the effect of holding in mind the very thing not to be done, and, interest being a source at least of action, if not of will, his resolution falls before the retained idea. A cashier, for example, who persistently says that he will not take the bank's money, is already in one of the stages of embezzlement. And yet, to repeat, on the theory of will as arbitrary, his persistent " I won't " ought to relieve him from further responsibility. His spirit is so willing ; only his flesh is weak ; so that, not upon him, but upon circumstances, lies the blame. In the moral life, in fine, one must always take the will for the deed; and, if taking, of course also offer it. Taking or offering the will for the deed is exactly what the theory of a creative or initia- tive will leads to ; and, accordingly, under this theory any creature at any time should be able to do anything, or at least should have and claim credit for such a universal ability. Any- body could preach, be president, practise medi- cine, study metaphysics, or even work on a railroad. The shivering poor, in midwinter, would be able to bask in summer's sunshine, and accordingly by the rich should be treated as always warm; and the city child, dreaming of the fragrant woods and hillsides, could go WILL. 215 forth at once and gather the nodding flowers. Bad characters, too, merely by taking thought could add cubits to their moral stature; and good characters could perform bad deeds with impunity. But are such possibilities as these the needs, the necessary conditions, of a moral life? Is society at the present time in any sub- stantial and positive way moral, because these possibilities are given the semblance of reality? Is taking the mere will for the deed effecting anything like a moral regeneration? The ques- tions carry their own answers ; and here for the sake of a moral order and of a substantial moral responsibility, as above for the sake of a con- sistent tenable theory, we have to conclude that will is action and action will. To separate will from action is to teach determinism and irresponsibility. Here is a racer toeing the mark in readiness for a race. At the appointed signal he dashes across the line and out upon the course; but who that knows how strained his muscles are, even while he waits, and how his chest rises and falls, and how his blood presses in his veins, can fail to believe that he is already in the race be- fore he "wills" to run? At the signal, then, he only wills to do what he already is doing, while before the signal he is only running the 2l6 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. race to himself, or thinking or " naming" it; and, in general, will is never of anything but what the agent is already doing. Will mediates existing activity, it does not create activity. A young man stands at what the commencement orators call the brink of life, and must choose what he will do, what he will be ; but neither can he nor will he choose to be what he is not, or to do what he is not already doing. His own real choice will lie in a volition to do what he is doing and has been doing. It might, then, be well for society to recognize this in planning for his education ; and it is certainly idle for others to choose for him. Of course, had he an arbi- trary will, he could assume successfully what- ever way of life might be thought wise for him ; but in the absence of such a will, another's choosing for him only gives him a uniform that never fits. Creatures in misfit uniforms, how- ever, are beggars. Any man whose life differs from his choice, or whose avowal differs from his will, is a beggar; and in human relations, the effect of supposing will a separate creative power is to induce, not freedom and responsi- bility, but beggary, — intellectual and moral and religious beggary. Because will is mediative, not materially creative, wholly external consequences of ac- WILL. 217 tion are quite impossible. After action the agent can never claim a lofty irresponsibility, exclaiming with reference to certain unfortunate results, " I did not mean to." Whatever is done is meant, and whatever one does shows just what one is. The underlying principle is that the very fact of action proves its results were intended, since merely to be able to act in a given set of conditions is to know before- hand how the conditions themselves may act. In a life that is essentially organic, that in- volves the original adjustment of an agent to his environment, action is most assuredly more than a mere blind gambling. Indeed, even at Monte Carlo, there is no such thing as blind gambling. The player wills to accept what- ever lot the wheel may turn. Similarly, to take a timely illustration from the more normal life, the cyclist, speeding around the corner and knowing exactly what may happen, wills the turning of his fateful wheel and cannot say in the event of a collision that he meant no one any harm. Any agent means whatever he knows may happen, and he knows what may happen if he be really an agent. Monte Carlo, then, is more than a mere locality where a peculiar life is cultivated ; it is born of gen- erally existing social conditions, being only an 2l8 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. abstraction for something very wide-spread. Certain reformers may loudly and holily con- demn the place, but not with any very telling effect, if they too assume that life's incidents are external to life itself, that the future is not in the present, or that will belongs to a separate soul. Of their dualism the life at Monte Carlo is but a startling parody, although, as said be- fore, even there a complete separation of will and action has not been found possible. What the gambling spirit of our time needs is not the preaching of unworldly idealists, but the removal of the many barriers to its suffering more speedily the consequences of its actions. Church and bank and state have helped in countless ways to foster it, and many are the conventions in family life and in education and in " society " that strengthen its conviction of irresponsibility. Strangely enough, at Monte Carlo the life avenges itself promptly, while in normal life the mediation is slow; so that society would seem to be sacrificing some of its members to the continuation of its own sinfulness. This, however, only means that society also has a mediating will, since its sacrifices are bound in time to induce control. CHAPTER XVIII. THE LIVING IDEAL. THE " World of Acts " is pre-eminently the world of morals and religion, and were we to select from all that has gone before the special conclusions that have the most direct bearing upon the moral and spiritual life, the originality of the self's adjustment to its environ- ment and the responsible mediation of will would be, I think, the ones taken. True, these two are in reality but a single conclusion, and the many others can be drawn from them very quickly; but these especially affect one's doctrine of personal conduct, because they face so directly the standpoints of Determin- ism and Indeterminism, of Materialism and Supernaturalism. Making adjustment original or, as the same thing, finding in environment a living mediator, is fatal to Determinism and Materialism, and making will substantially responsible is equally fatal to Indeterminism and Supernaturalism. 220 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. In a word, the simple evidence of our conclu- sions is that the self's activity is controlled from without neither in the way of an external and physically determining environment nor in the way of a separate and arbitrary soul. The self's activity controls itself. Whatever determination there is, is intrinsic. Also in the originality of adjustment, or the living mediation of environment, and in the sub- stantial responsibility of will, we see that the ideal of the self's activity is real and living, even while it is ideal. Moreover, the importance of this fact to the personal life can hardly be over- estimated. Not to secure or create new activity, but to fulfil the activity that already is ; not to become a new creature, but to prove the old creature ; not to save to the worldly self a sep- arate unworldly soul, but to express the saved self that already is, — this is what each living being has ever to do, this is the only urgency that the ideal imposes. The ideal is itself the activity, or the saved self, that already is. The Christian knows what it is to have the ideal real and living; and our thinking in these pages, as if in justification of Christianity, has only applied the Christian's belief to all the reaches of human interest, nay, to all the reaches of life in its en- tirety. As man is larger than men, so Christian- THE LIVING IDEAL. 221 ity is larger than man. Environment is a living mediator, a word incarnate. Of course the living ideal is personal, and in its own right. An external ideal, fixed and lifeless, belonging to the long-ago past or the far-away future, would be impersonal, tyran- nical, impossible, and so would depend on per- sonification. But a living ideal, to repeat, is personal, and, being personal in its own right, changes. It changes relatively to the life that it controls. Personality is always a relationship, not a lifeless unrelated thing ; and relationship requires change. If the criterion of the truth of an idea is its value as a plan that liberates will, or makes possible the application of force, then in like manner the criterion of the personal reality of an ideal is its value as a way of life that medi- ates action. Religion then is not now, and it never has been, the more or less arbitrary per- sonification of nature. It is and it always has been a personal relationship to nature. And what this all leads to, psychologically, is simply that a sense of personal relationship is intrinsic to the consciousness of an environ- ment. Thus, environment as other-than-the-self or as objective, the otherness or the objec- tivity being but a vital incident of the individ- ual self's own organic life, must itself be of 222 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. personal value and meaning to the individual, and must be also the sphere of other organic lives in themselves personally significant and valuable too. When, in an earlier chapter, we found that environment, or language, had a triple function, being at once objectively descriptive, socially mediative, and individually redemptive, we really had this same personality, which is fundamental in environment, before us; but here the fact is possibly even clearer than it was then. The single doctrine, of more re- cent pages, that will is mediative, not arbitrary, is conclusive evidence that personality in the outer world is not the creation of imagination or after-thought. Personality, whether in one's fellows or in one's whole environment, cannot be thought to be due to any such subtle pro- cess as projection of self, or ejection, or even injection, 1 or finally to anything else equally violent. As said before, man does not now, and in the past never has personified his en- vironment, but he is and always has been per- sonally related to it, and he does not, as if at a time of special interest and good-will, person- ify his fellows, but has to them also an original personal relation. 1 The inject > I believe, is yet to come to the mystification of philosophy. THE LIVING IDEAL. 223 The World of Acts, then, is a world of persons. Personality, which is only the act- uality of relationship under a new name, is its substance. And if to anybody this means that God is alive on earth, the Living Ideal, then the study now concluded will simply have turned from psychology to theology. APPENDIX. A STUDY OF IMMORTALITY IN OUTLINE. '5 APPENDIX. A STUDY OF IMMORTALITY IN OUTLINE. 1 AT the present time there are indications, which any who look can see, that human thought and human life are entering upon a new era, or permit me to say upon a new dynasty. It may, of course, be that at any time evidences of an important transition can be found; but should that be the case, one's responsibility to the changes of one's own time is made only truer and greater. The present dynasty began, as historians have very generally agreed, with certain early Greeks, and rose to its greatest glory and power in the days of imperial Rome, at once political and religious, temporal and spiritual, in her authority; and from Romanism, not specifically as a visible institution, but as an all-per- vading social condition, the present time is not by any means free, although a process of liberation is going on. When the liberation is fulfilled, then the new dynasty will appear, and upon appearance will 1 This u Study " was written independently of the present book, but it is appended here as a serviceable supplement to chapter xi. on "Body, Mind, Soul." 228 APPENDIX. of course be found to have begun even in what is now the prehistoric past. Contemporaneity sets the temporal as well as the spatial or territorial bounds of a dynasty. Thus, Greek thought and life and our present thought and life are fundamentally contemporaneous, and with them or with their sovereignty we connect certain more or less closely related parts of the earth's surface. The Greeks and ourselves have been under the control of the same idea of the self, as body or as mind or as soul. And as for a change of dynasty, this means, as has been hinted in part already, not only (i) the rise of a new visible sovereign, but also (2) a virtual extension into earlier times of the recognized " line of succession," a new dynasty always overlapping at both ends the supplanted one, and (3) a widening of the directly controlled domain. In general, change always deepens, and deepening brings fulfilment, not overthrow, and fulfilment, by revealing the " prehis- toric " past, makes it henceforth a vital part of the controlling present, and by displacing the existing life from its more or less limited part of the earth's terri- tory relates it positively to other parts that were for- mally closed to it. The historic past and the historic future — for of course there is always the latter in connection with the former — are bounded, very much as the ends of that history in miniature, the vari- colored spectrum, are bounded, by the nature, which is of course the sovereignty, of the observing self. Now, at the present time a new idea of the self, or APPENDIX. 229 rather a new self, is threatening the reigning sovereign. Psychologists, for example, are already at a real vari- ance with the long-standing separation of feeling, whether of body or of soul, and reason ; and the historians of antiquity, as if wholly in sympathy with psychology, are no longer satisfied with a formal paragraph or two, or even with a formal chapter or two, on the emotional, sensuous, nature- enslaved, pantheistic life of the Orient; and, politically, the Eastern Question is one of the most living questions of the day. 1 But a change of sovereignty at any time must intro- duce, in company with the new self, also new views of life and death, of immortality and mortality. Thus, at the present time, to bring body and soul into a real or positive relation, to make the soul not only in but also of the body, to find mind essential to both soul and body, is very plainly to alter radi- cally the meaning of the antithesis between the here and the hereafter. So, for a time abandoning the more general standpoint with which we have begun, let us turn specifically to this antithesis and its more immediate incidents. What has its meaning been, and what is its meaning getting to be? 1 To hint, as here, that the psychological question of the relation of emotion, sensuous or spiritual, to reason is really a phase of the Eastern Question, may seem to some very far- fetched indeed ; but the past history of psychology in its relation to politics is the only justification that I need for this merely apparent absurdity. 230 APPENDIX. II. Plato's demonstration of the soul's immortality very well represents the idea of life and death that has prevailed. In this demonstration Plato at once epito- mized the fall of his own native Greece, and gave report of the rise of conquering Rome. Thus he said : The composite or divisible dies, but the simple or indi- visible lives; and, as if at a stroke, for which the changes of history had been preparing for six centu- ries or more, he therein made soul and body two, not one, and mind, external to either, the arbitrary law of the body and the empty, unsubstantial form of the soul ; and so even invited Rome to the conquest of Greece. That Plato's mortal body and immortal soul and external or abstract mind are those of current belief must be apparent to all, and that they have been the foundations of the still surviving condition of Roman- ism is a matter of well-known history. An infallible or irresponsible reason, an irrational faith, and a law- less body, — these are at once the widely current pre- suppositions of social life and the working hypotheses of historical record. We still live, so this means, a life that is external both to its conditions and to its results; we live even now in another world, wholly apart from this ; and accordingly another world, an hereafter that has no positive relation to the here, that is merely added on from without, is not perhaps our APPENDIX. 23 1 only goal, but is at least commonly supposed to be our only spiritual goal. In this world, because it is composite, its parts being only formally and so at best only temporally related, we are dead or at least dying. Even recent Biology, as if under the spell of Platonism, has made the life of an organism external to its inci- dents, persistently treating the physical environment as essentially inorganic. But, as all are aware, more than eighteen centuries ago Christianity came as a protest against Plato's standpoint. Apart from its theological terms, it was a doctrine of life on earth, of the spiritual as not only in but also of the physical, of the simple and immortal as in some real way not opposed to the physical and mortal, of this world and the other world as not two but one. " Now is the accepted time ; now is the day of salvation." " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these, my brethren, even these least, ye have done it unto me." " I am the way, the truth, and the life ; no man cometh unto the Father but by me." As for Romanism, 1 this has rested in the literal Christ, not in the spiritual ; in the deified man, not in the God. Moreover, if one may so speak, the mis- take of history, religious or political or intellectual, has been the mistake of literalism. Whatever it may have meant to Plato or to Rome, to Christianity 1 It must be kept in mind that by Romanism is always meant here an all-pervading social condition, not any visible institution. As just now hinted, even Biology has entertained Romanism or Platonism. 232 APPENDIX. denial of the world did not mean a spiritual isolation. Christianity was a fulfilment, and it was so presented by its Prophet. The Christian negation of the com- posite, of the mortal body, intended something else than assertion of a separate world for the simple and immortal, and Christianity, in the face of centuries of resistance and unappreciative interpretation has strug- gled to make this something else explicit. But what else? Why, nothing more nor less than that the physical itself is not composite, not a thing of exter- nally or only formally related parts, not dead nor even dying, but organic and so always living ; and into this more truly Christian idea of life, into the ful- filling Christianity, as if an inheritance from long ago, we are entering to-day. Soul as the substantial reality, the fulfilling life of the body, or life as responsible to its incidents, or body as organic, is the rising sover- eign of the new dynasty. III. I pass by the evidences of the change in social and political life and those even in the doctrines of pres- ent-day ethics and theology. I refrain, too, from any special mention of the more recent doctrines in psy- chology of emotion, of knowledge, or of will. I go directly to the physical sciences for the witness, which they bear, that matter, the physical, can no longer be conceived as lifeless, — that is, as composed of ele- ments, — but must be recognized as alive and organic. APPENDIX. 233 Thus, Chemistry has indeed entertained for a long time the doctrine of a conserved matter in connection with its doctrine of atoms, and until comparatively recent times a conserved matter has been rather a negative than a positive idea, standing for the simple as non- composite, and only serving as a corrective, although an unappreciated corrective, of the retained standpoint of atomism; but to-day Chemistry has completely subordinated mere elemental composition to an organizing or interrelating process and has so ar- rived at, or all but arrived at, a truly positive mean- ing for matter as conserved and indivisible. What else, for example, but that matter is literally, actually, essentially organic can be meant by the thorough- going application of mathematics to chemical phe- nomena, or by the notion of an evolutional order in the different elements? The space and the time in which mathematics thinks are not composite but indivisible, or at once relational and dynamic, — that is to say, organic, — and an evolutional order must mean, among other things, that quality and substance are inseparable. To relate atoms in any way is to destroy their atomic or elemental character. Chemistry, then, as mathematical and evolutional, is dividing its own atom — out of existence. And Physics, instead of any longer identifying force with matter in ?notion, as if matter and motion were altogether separate realities, has virtually gotten rid of its dualism, or, to be still more specific, instead of depending on the trinity of (1) a spaceless and time- less or indivisible medium, motionless and inert, 234 APPENDIX. (2) a dividing vibration in a divisible space and time, which has been saved from its own absurdity only by the indivisible medium, and (3) a physical force or quality external alike to the substantiating medium and the mediating vibration, has now a con- ception of quality or force that — not to mention other results — makes the notion of an abstract merely underlying medium untenable. As a mathe- matical and evolutional chemistry no longer needs a conserved matter, so a physics, that has also turned mathematical and that has no doctrine so important as that of the mutability of forces, can do without the indivisible impenetrable medium. Not only are the physical qualities, which have all been found to be incidents, although external incidents, of vibrations of one sort or another, recognized as reducible to one, but also in proportion as the vibrations are short and rapid and lateral the quality generated is supposed to be an important condition of organic life. In short, the ultimate physical quality, as it were the limit, wherein medium and vibration and quality are finally identified, must be life itself. What wonder, then, that Biology is saying in so many ways that Physics and particularly Chemistry must be appealed to for light upon the central biolo- gical problems. Like the other world, or the im- mortal soul of Plato, Chemistry's conserved matter and Physics' underlying medium have been but gods worshipped in ignorance, indirections or abstrac- tions for the persistent fact of organic life. Biol- ogy, however, as might be expected, and as has been APPENDIX. 235 remarked already, has not been without its own Pla- tonism. Particularly in its " vital unit," an indefinitely small part, — to-day smaller even than the discovered cell, and for that matter always smaller than any known part, — Biology has fallen into the error of a pure lifeless abstraction for the living and organic ; and the inorganic environment, already referred to, also shows how the science of life has been asleep to its own presuppositions. Simply, if environment be related to life, it must itself be organic — indeed, is not every organism itself a natural part of its own so- called environment? — and, to return to the other point, if really alive, the "vital unit" can hardly be a thing for microscopic discovery. The simple- minded dogma that the " vital unit " is immortal is as delightful a bit of supernaturalism as recent times have afforded. As a paradox, however, true in spite of itself, it precipitates the new era. The divinity of the man Christ was the same paradox, as it came to human experience centuries ago. Not an organism, as some specific portion of matter, large or small, but the organic is immortal. So, in summary, whatever immortality has been ascribed to an immaterial soul or to a conserved matter, to a " vital unit " or to an underlying me- dium, belongs to the living and organic, for which these several immortals — I was tempted to entitle this study " With the Immortals " — have been sheer indirections. 1 In the sense of the material as com- 1 Sometimes called working hypotheses, or Hiilfsbegriffe, which they certainly are. 236 APPENDIX. posite, the soul, the immortal self, is indeed immate- rial ; but in reality the material is not composite but organic, so that the soul can be said to be at once material and immortal. The composite may decom- pose, and decomposition is death, but the organic never dies. IV. But what, asks somebody, is to become of personal or individual immortality ? Well, that certainly is not lost here, but is assured, as never before. An im- material soul is not now at all necessary to a belief in individual immortality, unless, forsooth, in the very face of Christianity and in the very face of the latest science, one insist that individuals are atoms or are, at least as manifested in this world's time and space, only their visible bodies. Individuality or personality is relationship as something actual and substantial, and relationship is never lost. The very fulfilment or substantiation of a relationship involves a separation of the individual from anything like a confining body. Organic life involves change, decay, a certain kind of death ; but the organic relations, that make or that are individuals, survive even the most radical changes. 1 The organic, then, is a constant triumph over death, and above all over the death of individuals. Also — and this should be reflected upon, as showing so posi- 1 This, obviously enough, is as true in the phenomena of Chemistry and Physics and Biology as it is true in those of human society. APPENDIX. 237 lively what individuality is — it is a constant triumph over birth. Individuals neither die nor come into being. To any one who still recognizes no criterion of in- dividuality but that of mere physical or spatial and tem- poral isolation, the foregoing will be only so many empty words, but the true Christian out of his own experience can interpret my meaning. In which sense was Christ an individual? If in that of physi- cal isolation, he certainly was not immaculately con- ceived and he certainly did not rise from the dead, but if in that of organic relationship he was not born as are men and he lives now and is the sovereign of the present life. Too many that call themselves Chris- tians forget the birth and the resurrection, or, if not forgetting, only parody them into a physical appear- ance and reappearance nearly two thousand years ago. Science, always getting its habit of mind from religion, has made a parody of them too. So now we can conclude, summarily, that the an- tithesis between the here and the hereafter is not, at least for the now rising dynasty, between this world and another or between the present and an wholly separate future, but between two perfectly real and contemporaneous aspects of the world that now is. Does the eternity, into which at what is called death we are said to pass, begin after the life here is ended? By no means. Eternity now is, and is, not in the sense of a time which can find for itself no content in the present life, but in that of a time whose content is the present life. "The Kingdom 238 APPENDIX. of Heaven is at hand." At what we call death we do not leave this earth, but enter into it. Our death is our life in it ; not our burial, but our resurrection. How can that which was never born of woman die? To some, perhaps to very many, the view of im- mortality here outlined will seem to be (1) the doc- trine of Metempsychosis, or (2) only the Positivistic doctrine of a death- surviving " influence," or (3) what is known most commonly as Spiritualism. No one of these interpretations, however, is at all ade- quate, since all show a virtual return to the un- christian notion of the individual as determined by an isolated body, and so to the separation of soul from body or of quality, which is " influence," both from that which has it and from that which gener- ates it. The view here outlined is not Metempsychosis nor Positivism nor Spiritualism, but it is the inner truth of all these partial views. Thus, it does free the soul from a confining body, and teach that in- fluence is immortal, and even that the dead communi- cate with the living; but it says that the freedom, which is really from only when also in the body, is as real before death as after, and that both per- sonality and " influence " survive, the two being one. Spiritualism and Positivism are mutually comple- APPENDIX. 239 mentary and corrective, the former very properly insisting that the surviving influence is of a real substantial individual, and the latter that the sur- viving individual is not an immaterial spirit, the soul's substance being the organic, not the imma- terial; and Metempsychosis, in which is evident a formal conciliation of Positivism and Spiritualism, is right in keeping the hereafter here, but wrong in retaining the merely physical criterion of indi- viduality. The soul's transmigration is not a passage from one body to another, but, so far as it can be physically recounted, the organic union of two in a third. 1 Even Plato taught Metempsychosis at one time in his life, — at the time when he was interested in transporting Greek life to Sicily, where he hoped to establish the ideal state ; but afterwards he came to see that the future home of the Greek was not in another wholly separate body, and Rome came finally, as if the third body, including and so relating Greece and Plato's Sicily. Moreover, that Rome was the realization of the ideal Greek state is one of the commonplaces of history. Significantly enough, too, it appears that Metempsychosis was taught long before Plato's time, when the Greek communities in Asia Minor and on the farther islands of the ^Egean Sea were sending out colonies or themselves moving bodily to the west, so that Plato's ideal was 1 Compare the account of motion as not a passing from one point to another, but a relating of two separate points to a third. The infinitesimal of pure mechanics has made it this. 240 APPENDIX. no visionary one. The very migration that he thought of had already taken place, and Rome came in evidence of it. In a word, then, Greece was already in the west before she finally migrated thither; or, when she finally migrated thither, she did not leave her own home. VI. And, finally, again to venture a remark or two upon the political significance of the new — or is it really only the " prehistoric " ? — view of life and death, 1 other-worldliness or supernaturalism is evi- dently a necessary standpoint, when the life of any part, large or small, is isolated from any other part of the whole sphere of life. Isolation of the Greek from the Barbarian led finally to Plato's Athens, where the Greek found himself separated even from himself, and the isolation of Christendom from the uncivilized and unchristian parts of the earth is responsible for our modern Platonism. Belief in another world, how- ever, is the natural corrective of partiality in this, the other world believed in being only the unity of this, so that, as was suggested at the beginning, our present- day supernaturalism and the closed life of the Orient are but two phases of one experience, and with the decline of supernaturalism will come, is coming, the opening of the Orient. Has not all Christendom 1 The " prehistoric " life and death have always been those of a " Golden Age." APPENDIX. 241 owed its belief in immortality to the unchristian Orient ? Strange indeed are the paradoxes of history ! East and West, as if soul and body, or faith and reason, or nature and man,.or immortality and mortal- ity, are not two but one ; and in the evidence of their unity we find the dawn of the new dynasty, of the old, the prehistoric Christianity. 16 INDEX. INDEX. Note. — This Index is for the most part rather topical than verbal. The literal words will not always be found on the pages referred to. Also this Index is rather selective than exhaustive. Abiogenesis, 56. Accuracy, dependent on interest, 127. Activity, dependent on relation- ship, 43 ; reactive or interactive, 197; as not serial, 212. Adjustment, original, 84, 159, 220; derived by chance, 136. Afferent Theory, 163, 210. After-image, 188. Anaxagoras, his view of world and mind, 47. Animals, conscious and thinking, 19 ; social to men, 91 ; views about, in Comparative Psychol- ogy, 163. Anthropomorphism, 59. Architecture, and space-perception, 78. Aristotle, 16, 115. Association, 82, 174. Athletics, placeof, in education, 124. Attention, theories of, 173. Baldwin, 187. Berenson, 66 n. Biology, 84, 136, 142, 231, 234. Body, as intelligent, 59; as instru- ment of adjustment, 60; its functions interchangeable, 62 ; feeling in, 168; and soul, 129, 229. Causation, 57, 198. Change, general nature of, 48 ; necessary to relationship, 52 ; as reproduction, restoration, or substitution, 64. Chemistry, 47, 121, 233. Child, and growth of space-percep- tion, 81. Christ, 107, 109, 135, 231, 235, 237. Christian Science, y^ Christianity, 107, 130, 220, 231, 241. City, and country, in social evolu- tion, 190. Classification, 36, 100, 138. Coexistence, and sequence, 153. Composition, inner meaning of, 40; and simplicity, 131, 230; and mortality, 141, 230. Compulsion, in education, 123, 125, 173. Conception, as dynamic, 117. Conception, Immaculate, 237-8. Consciousness, general nature of, 17,65, 69, 89, 112, 163 j essen- tially social, 23, 89 ; individual, 26 ; subject to Law of Relativity, 66 ; related to life and thought, 17-21 ; organs of, not limited, 68, 105 ; as never epiphenomenal, 162. 246 INDEX. Country, and city, in social evolu- tion, 190. Creationism, 57, 199, 203, 214. Decomposition, 132, 230. Descartes, 162. Determinism, 219. Dewey, 177 n. Dualism, and objectivity, 29; in science, 56, 136, 140; vs. Mo- nism, 158 ; in theory of emotion, 167, of attention, 173, of action, 198, of will, 213, of effort, 210, of immortality, 139, 230; in education, 105, 123-6. Education, illustrations from, 101, 105, 123-129, 169, 173. Effort, 210. Emotion, and interest, 167; theories of, 170. Entelechy, 16. Environment, as organic, 54; its living mediation, 72; natural and social, 89, 118; as linguis- tic, 27, 92, 179; as alien, 136; as originally personal, 221. Epistemology, 47 n., 114. Evolution, science of, as still su- pernaturalistic, 136 ; and time, 149, 153; social, five stages of, 193 ; vs. Creationism, 203. Expression, symbolic, and right- handedness, 187. Extension, relation of, to intension, 36. Faculties, thought and sensa- tion, 104; Monistic doctrine of, 161. Fechner, 67. Feeling, and interest, 167; theories of, 170. Force, as nature of space, yy ; and idea, 120 ; in relation to space and time, 1565 a recent idea of, 2 33- Formalism, 97-106; defined, 100; in history, 10 7-1 10; in educa- tion, 123-126; vs. Dynamic Idealism, 158; (in theory of space, 76, of time, 147.) Freedom, and law, 81, 115 ; and will, 200, 209. Functions, of body, interchange- able, 62. Greeks, philosophy of, 16, 45, 49, 130, 192, 230, 239. Habit, original, 84; relation of, to impulse and instinct, 203-8. Hegel, 168. History, and time, 153. Homer, 171. Homoeomeries, 46-7. Ideas, as forms, 97; as forces, 113; as not innate, 161. Immaculate Conception, 237 Immortality, 51, 139, 155, 159. 227. Impulse, relation of, to instinct and habit, 203-8. Incarnate Word, 107, 221. Indeterminism, 219. Individuality, 36, 164, 207, 236. Inheritance, 39, 137, 160. Innervation Theory, 163, 210. Inorganic, concept of, criticised, 54. Instinct, relation to impulse and habit, 203-8. Intelligence, and intelligibility, 45; as essential to the body, 59; and language, 178-197. Intelligibility, 41-45. Intension, and extension, 36. Intuitionalism, 76. James, 176, 211. INDEX. 247 Kant, 190 n. Knowledge, for knowledge's sake, 12, 101, 124. Language, true function of, 27; as general as environment, 27, 92, 179 ; dead, in education, 103, 124 ; and thought, 178; as after-image, 188; meaning of sciences of, 1S0; dependence of, on control, 182 ; and right- handedness, 187 ; three special functions of, 189 ; illustrated in social evolution, 190. Life, conscious and rational, 17-21, 52 ; not created, 56-7 ; universal, 52, 54, 135; immortal, 51, 139, 159, 227. Localization, of sensation, 71, 126; of self, 70, 160. Locke, 162. Materialism, 73, 219. Mathematics, 37, 47 n., 80, 1 54, 233. Matter, inorganic, 54 ; as not ab- stract, y^; as conserved, 140, 233; as one with mind, 159 ; as organic, 56, 232 ; as immortal, 140, 233. Measurement, and space-percep- tion, 79. Mechanicalism, 61. Medium,abstract, 103, 124, 162,233. Memory, 124, 156 n. Metaphysics, and Psychology, vi. Metempsychosis, 143, 238. Mind, 'intrinsic to all things, 45, 99, 159 ; as seen by physical science, 121. Mixture, infinite, as account of relationship, 46. Monism, and objectivity, 21-29 > vs. Dualism, 158 ; in science, 57, 138 ; in theory of emotion, 171, of attention, 174, of asso- ciation, 174, of action, 201, of impulse, instinct, and habit, 204 ; in religion, 220. Monte Carlo, 217, 218. Motion, relativity of, 49 ; Greek paradoxes of, 49 ; and space, 78, 156 ; as a relating of points, 239 n. Motive, and stimulus, 172, 201. Negation, value of, in thought, 20, 54 ; fatality of, in volition, 213. Number, meaning of, 36. Object, of consciousness, 21-31 ; as social institution, 22-6, 89 ; as language, 27, 92 ; organic re- lation of, to subject, 58, 83, 117 ; its living mediation, 72. Objectivity, spatial, rational, and moral, 29-30 ; spatial, 75 ; ra- tional, 97 ; spiritual, 197 ; and control, 183. Organic, as all-inclusive, 54 ; in- telligence of, 59 ; substantially relational, 54 ; as involving sep- aration of subject and object, 54-8 ; as immortal, 142, 232 ; as triumph over both death and birth, 236-7. Organs, of body, never acting in isolation, 64 ; of sense, unlim- ited in number, 68 ; of conduct and thought, 65, 186 ; periphe- ral, 88. Orient, 229, 240. Perception, 88, 115. Peripheral organs, 88. Personification, 221. Physics, 47, 121, 233. Plants, as conscious, 19. Plato, 130, 192, 230, 239. Positivism, 238. Practice, and theory, 127. Present, specious, 149. Psychology, and metaphysics, vi.; 248 INDEX. defined, 11-17 ; socialistic, not individualistic, 25. Qualities, not external to things, 38 ; common in association, 174. Reading, psychology of, 184. Recapitulation, biological, 154; in Mathematics, 155. Relationism, 49, 87, 143, 147, 162, 178 ; in a summary, 158. Relations, substantial, 41 ; imply- ing activity, 43 ; essential to the organic, 54 ; basis of intelligibil- ity and intelligence, 41 ; essence of space, 77 ; immortal, 142, 232. Relativity, Law of, 66, 114, 161, 183. Religion, the supreme education, 109; and Dualism, 140; in so- cial evolution, 194 ; as a per- sonal relationship to nature, 221. Reproduction, 64. Restoration, after injury, 63. Resurrection, 237. Retention, 156 n. Right-handedness, 186, 187 n. ; in social evolution, 192. Romanes, 18. SCHLEIERMACHER, 102, III. Schopenhauer, 167. Science, defined, 12 ; supernat- uralism in, 136 ; Christian, 72, '■> accuracy of, 127 ; illustrations from, 39, 56, 62, 84, 103, 120, 136, 142, 154, 175- Self, parts of, 129. Self-consciousness, 90, 163. Sensation, 68 ; localization of, 71, 126 ; formal, 47; not a separate faculty, 104, 161 ; an innate idea, 162; dynamic, 113. Sensationalism, 76. Sense-organs, see Organs. Sequence, and coexistence, 153. Society, organism, 164; t 190-4; classes in, 192; evolu- tion of, in five stages, 193. Solar system, motion of, 50. Soul, defined, 15-17 ; and body, 129, 229; emotion of, 168; transmigration of, 143, 238 ; immortality of, 139, 159, 236. Space, 76; and time, 154, 233; and motion, 78, 156. Spinoza, 85. Spiritualism, 238. Stimulus, and motive, 172, 201. Subject, organic relation of, to object, 58, 82, i*7- Substitution, after injury, 63. Summaries, 28, 47, 87, 106, 158, 237- Supernaturalism, 136, 219, 235. Theory, and practice, 127. Thing, individual, as a relation, 35. Thinker, duty of, 20, 102. Thought, relation of, to life and consciousness, 17-21; as not separate from sensation, 161 ; and language, 178 ; as rehearsal or activity to self, 181; special organs of, 65, 186. Time, not formal, 147; and evo- lution, 149; paradoxes of, 149; and space, 154. Transmigration, of the soul, 143, 238. Travel, two views of, 48. Unit, vital, immortality of, 142 ; as only an abstraction, 235. University, and technical schools, 127. Vital Unit, immortality of, 142; as only an abstraction, 235. Weber, 67. Will, 209; and deed, 214; media- tive, not creative, 216, 220. Word Incarnate, 107, 221. 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